Saul Steinberg, Riflessi e ombre, 2022

Saul Steinberg could be said to have embodied an art genre of which he was the sole representative, a devotee and master, surrounded by an invisible and ecumenical audience of admiring spectators. He was like a guru who, rather than expressing himself through sentences or treatises, regularly sent unforgettable cartoons to the New Yorker. Without uttering a word, he showed us a thought and a sensitivity that reached far beyond—and ultimately returned to us the entire world “transformed into a line, a single broken, twisted, discontinuous line” (Calvino). A foe of all theatrical clamor, Steinberg only in his later years decided to recount, in brief strokes, the first part of his life, which had taken him from Romania to the Milan of the 1930s, and finally to New York, where he would become its most ironic and melancholic poet. These troubled and fascinating years are depicted here—with the collaboration of his old friend Aldo Buzzi—with an understatement that paradoxically heightens the significance of every detail. But this fragment of autobiography must have struck a chord with some very secret chords, if Steinberg never decided to publish it. And only today, two years after his death, Reflections and Shadows, a true gem and, no less than one of his drawings, instantly recognizable by its style, can be published in Italy in its first world edition.