Saul Steinberg called himself “a writer who draws”, and the phrase is a good key to his work. His drawings are arguments made with a pen: a single line becomes a horizon, then a table edge; a rubber-stamped seal turns into a portrait; a map shrinks the world to the far side of the Hudson. Designers study him because he shows how much meaning one mark can carry.
A note on images: no Saul Steinberg record at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art or the Metropolitan Museum of Art is flagged as public domain, so his work is described here in text. It remains under copyright, and nothing here suggests it is free to reuse. For cleared images from museum collections, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Saul Steinberg?
Steinberg was born in 1914 in Râmnicu Sărat, Romania; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago both give his dates as 1914–1999 and describe him as American, born in Romania. In 1933 he moved to Milan to study architecture at the Politecnico, a training that shows in his ruled lines, plans and elevations. While still a student he began contributing cartoons to the Milanese humour paper Bertoldo in 1936, according to the Saul Steinberg Foundation and encyclopedia.com.
Under Italy’s antisemitic racial laws he left in 1941 and waited about a year in the Dominican Republic for a visa to the United States, according to encyclopedia.com. His first drawing for The New Yorker appeared in October 1941, before he reached New York in 1942. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) record say he was commissioned in the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1943, the year he became a citizen, and served in China.
In 1944 he married the painter Hedda Sterne, a date both the Saul Steinberg Foundation and the Hedda Sterne Foundation record. In 1946 the Museum of Modern Art included him in its exhibition Fourteen Americans, according to Crystal Bridges and encyclopedia.com; the Delaware Art Museum gives the year as 1947. He died in New York in 1999.
Key works of Saul Steinberg
The works below are dated and attributed by museum records or by the Saul Steinberg Foundation.
- The Parade, 1950. Pen and ink, watercolour, wax crayon and gold paper at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which lists it at 37 cm high and more than 6.4 metres long: a frieze read like a scroll.
- The Line, 1954. Made for the Children’s Labyrinth at the 10th Milan Triennial, where it was enlarged and incised into a wall. The Saul Steinberg Foundation describes the drawing as about 18 by 404 inches, folded into sections, and starting and ending with a drawn hand.
- The Americans, 1958. A mural for the U.S. Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair, about 240 feet long according to the Saul Steinberg Foundation. It was cut up after the fair and reassembled at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2013.
- View of the World from 9th Avenue, cover dated 29 March 1976. A map-like view in which Manhattan blocks fill the foreground and the rest of the world shrinks to a strip beyond the Hudson.
- Rain on Hiroshige Bridge III, 1980. Pen and ink, coloured pencil and rubber stamps on a folded sheet, at the Art Institute of Chicago.
What to look at in Saul Steinberg’s drawings
The line that changes its mind
In The Line, one continuous stroke runs across the whole sheet and keeps changing what it is: a horizon, a water surface, a table, a railway track. The drawing works because the line never breaks; only its context changes. The same element can play several roles in a layout if its neighbours tell the reader how to read it.
Styles as characters
Steinberg often drew different people in different drawing styles in the same scene: one figure in a fussy engraver’s hatching, another in a child’s scrawl, a third as a geometric diagram. The style itself becomes the personality. Line weight, texture and finish are content, not decoration.
Rubber stamps and official marks
From the 1940s on he used rubber stamps as a drawing tool. The Art Institute of Chicago catalogues B Movie (1948) with a rubber stamp in grey ink and gummed registration crosses, and Untitled (Rush Hour) (c. 1969) as rubber stamps in black ink with pen. Repeated stamped figures read as crowds and paperwork; Artforum’s review of a Steinberg exhibition notes that he bought or made hundreds of stamps. The stamp is an early form of the reusable component: a fixed graphic unit repeated to build something larger.
Maps, plans and elevations
The architectural training shows everywhere: ruled graphite guidelines, frontal façades, cornices drawn like specimens. View of the World from 9th Avenue borrows the language of the map and distorts its scale to make a point about how a city sees itself. Detail packs the foreground; the distance flattens into a few labelled strips.
Technique: pen, stamp, collage and the folded sheet
The Art Institute’s records repeatedly list pen and black ink over graphite, with erasing and ruling in graphite, on ivory wove paper. To that base he added watercolour, coloured crayon, coloured pencil, rubber stamps and cut-and-pasted paper. Untitled (Table Still Life on Music Paper) (1971) is drawn on printed sheet music, and Rain on Hiroshige Bridge III is folded, with the fold built into the composition.
He also moved freely between formats. The Art Institute holds a screen-printed silk scarf he designed in 1966 for Maison Brochier in Lyon. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds The Model Exhibit (1972), crayon and rubber stamp on wood. The Metropolitan Museum has The Elephant Table (1975), which combines oil, graphite, coloured pencil, ink and collage elements on canvas, paper and wood.
The 1980 title names Hiroshige; for the Japanese printmaker’s rain-swept bridges, see our guide to Hiroshige’s landscape prints.
Saul Steinberg in print and on the wall
Much of his work reached people as reproduction: magazine pages, covers, books and lithographs. Main Street Sometime Next Week (1972–73), a colour lithograph at the Metropolitan Museum, and Tree, Nine Variations (1968) show how he treated printmaking as another drawing surface rather than a reproduction method. If you want to understand how those printed colour layers are built, our explainer on lithography walks through the process.
Major exhibitions followed his career and continued after it. The Morgan Library & Museum staged Saul Steinberg: Illuminations from December 2006 to March 2007, a career retrospective curated by Joel Smith that travelled to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Cincinnati Art Museum. The Norton Museum of Art showed Saul Steinberg: A Writer Who Draws in 2021–22.
For contrast, compare the fluid theatre caricatures in our Al Hirschfeld guide, where Steinberg’s line is often ruled.
How designers can borrow from Saul Steinberg
- Make one element do several jobs. Take a single rule, border or stroke and let it change role across a spread: divider, horizon, underline.
- Use style as a variable. In an illustration system, assign different rendering styles to different voices or user types, the way Steinberg drew each character in a different hand.
- Build with stamps. Design a small set of fixed marks (icons, figures, seals) and compose them by repetition.
- Distort the map on purpose. For a campus, a festival or a neighbourhood guide, enlarge what your audience cares about and compress the rest, as the 1976 cover does.
- Let the fold work. Steinberg composed across folds. Plan leaflets and zines so the fold reveals or divides the image rather than cutting through it.
Copyright and where to see his work
Saul Steinberg died in 1999, and the museums that hold his drawings and prints mark the records as in copyright, so images are not shown here. The Art Institute of Chicago holds a large group of drawings given by the Saul Steinberg Foundation; the Met, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Morgan and the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan also hold his work. To understand how public-domain status works for older images, read our guide to public domain art.
Frequently asked questions
What is Saul Steinberg known for?
He is known for six decades of drawings and covers for a New York weekly magazine, especially View of the World from 9th Avenue (1976), and for drawings, murals and constructions in which line, stamps and collage comment on drawing itself.
Did Saul Steinberg train as an architect?
Yes. He studied architecture at the Politecnico in Milan from 1933, and ruled lines, façades and plans remain visible throughout his drawings.
Why did Saul Steinberg use rubber stamps?
Stamps let him repeat a fixed mark to suggest crowds, documents and bureaucracy. Art Institute of Chicago records for B Movie (1948) and Untitled (Rush Hour) (c. 1969) list stamps alongside pen and ink.
Are Saul Steinberg’s drawings public domain?
No. The Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art mark his works as in copyright, so they are described here in text only. Check each image’s status with the holding museum before any use.
