Untitled (Collage with Photos, Ticket Stubs, and Hotel Bill)
1970/80
Saul Steinberg American, born Romania, 1914-1999
United States
A collector of souvenirs and printed odds and ends, Steinberg freely applied and riffed on them in works such as this one. This composition of ephemera and drawn interludes resembles a scrapbook page of mementos, except that each column of images seems like an independent sequence that should add up but doesn’t. The collage elements become word surrogates, components of visual sentences that “read” from top to bottom yet fail to form a cohesive story—just as the handwritten “captions” only appear to have meaning but are in fact only shapes that resemble letters.
Collage of cut-and-pasted various commercially printed papers, graphite on tan wove papers, and watercolor on off-white wove paper, selectively varnished and found paper items, and on off-white paperboard with graphite and pen and brush and black ink