The Fundación Juan March is presenting the first complete retrospective in Spain devoted to Saul Steinberg (Râmnicu Sărat, Romania, 1914 - New York, 1999) at its headquarters in Madrid. Featuring drawings, paintings, prints, collages and three-dimensional objects, as well as photographs, artists’ books and magazines, the show is unprecedented in Spain, the only previous Steinberg exhibition, at the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno in 2002, having concentrated only on the artist’s drawings.

The exhibition benefits from the support and collaboration of The Saul Steinberg Foundation in New York, the principal source for research on the artist’s work and its diffusion. In addition, the Fundación Juan March is one of the recipients of donations of Steinberg’s art that the Foundation has been making to various international institutions, and will be receiving around 50 works for its holdings. These will be included in the exhibition alongside important loans from public institutions and private collections in Europe and the United States, including the Centre Pompidou, Galerie Maeght, and the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan, as well as the artist’s heirs and friends.

Saul Steinberg opted for drawing as the medium that offered the greatest degree of freedom, a choice that contributed to the worldwide dissemination of his work in popular culture and via the media, above all his close collaboration with the magazine The New Yorker for more than 50 years. His messages spread from New York all over the world, as exemplified by one of his most iconic drawings, View of the World from 9th Avenue, 1976. For many years Steinberg lived in the heart of New York's intellectual life. Despite not being a conceptual artist, his drawings made him the subject of Harold Rosenberg’s admiration.In 1978, Rosenberg said that Steinberg could be considered to have emerged among American post-war artists as a figure who revolutionized painting and sculpture by introducing the new subject matter of “the mystery of individual identity”.

Steinberg's work resists any easy categorization. As he himself said: "I don't belong to the art world, cartoon or magazine world, so the art world doesn't quite know where to place me." His fluid transition between different artistic and literary genres is essential to his work and can perhaps also be seen as a reflection of his life, his times and the position he occupied in the context of the turbulent 20th century. An admirer of Nikolai Gogol and his theater of the absurd, Steinberg was in tune with contemporary artists and intellectuals such as Samuel Beckett and Alberto Giacometti and with some Romanian exiles such as Emil Cioran, Constanin Brancusi and Eugène Ionesco, sharing his insight and intelligence. It is in this space, located between the stage and the book, that much of Steinberg’s work can be located. 

The exhibition explores Steinberg's various facets as a creator, while analyzing his broad iconography with a retrospective rather than linear view, as his themes tend to persist over time. The themes of the exhibition range from the Bombings (Bombings) y All in Line (All about the line)The first two are the "migrants", which reflect his condition as a migrant seeking to establish his identity, to the "immigrants", which reflect his condition as a migrant seeking to establish his identity. Animals y BuildingsThe latter is dedicated to some of the New York architecture that so fascinated the young architect; Las Vegaswith its satirical view of the United States; and Travels around Europe (Travel for Europe). In addition to drawings, the exhibition includes wooden assemblies, such as the Drawng Table Reliefs (Drawing board reliefs)and fully three-dimensional tables, on which Steinberg carved objects and figures. Also on display are the drawings of the Children's Labyrinthpublic sculpture created by the architectural firm BBPR for the X Milan Triennale (1954), composed of sgraffito drawings on a tri-lobed structure. Another inclusion in the exhibition are the Photoworks by Steinberg, photos on which he drew to change the context or photos of on-site drawings made in the streets of the city (1950). Visitors will also see examples of the work of two other great photographers, Inge Morath and Lee Miller, both Steinberg collaborators. Morath recorded the series Masks (Masks)in which he photographed individuals and groups wearing Steinberg's masks. 

Among the murals Steinberg created throughout his career, Art Viewers of 1966, presented that year at the Gallery Maeght of Paris, is one of the most fascinating in the. A mural-collage of cut-out pieces of canvas, the culmination of a recurring theme in the artist's work: the viewer's gaze on art. At once satirical and complimentary, this work will occupy a prominent place in the exhibition.

The accompanying publication is the first comprehensive visual source on Saul Steinberg in Spanish. It includes all the works and documentation on display, accompanied by essays by Spanish experts such as Alicia Chillida, guest curator of the exhibition, and Maite Muñoz, art critic and dean of the Escuela Técnica de Arquitectura de Madrid. Among the international experts contributing essays are Sheila Schwartz, director of Research and Archives at the Saul Steinberg Foundation, and independent curator Francesca Pellicciari. In addition to a revised chronology of the artist and an updated critical apparatus, the publication will also include a critical anthology and an essay on Steinberg by Harold Rosenberg.