Saul Steinberg: A Biography Part 6

One of the few professional highlights of the early spring was the visit to New York of the Italian architect Ernesto Rogers, with whom Steinberg was delighted to renew a prewar acquaintance that became an abiding friendship, although a qualified one at the start. Steinberg thought Rogers was one of the tourists who went home and wrote a book about "Me and America" after three weeks in the country. He changed his mind as their first luncheon lengthened to fill five hours. When Rogers became intrigued by Steinberg's description of Hedda's latest paintings of machines and buildings, Steinberg took him to Betty Parsons's gallery to see them. Rogers left with "great admiration" for Hedda and invited Saul to bring her to his home in Bergamo when they went to Italy in July. Yet again Saul was pleased to be married to an intelligent, talented, and beautiful woman and proud that others recognized her extraordinary qualities. He could tell her so in letters, but unfortunately he was unable to convey these feelings when they were alone together.

She had gone to France again, and this time her reasons were far more serious. For the second year in a row, he wrote in letters what he simply could not say in person: "I made up my mind in your absence that I'm forever attached to you and all the talk about betrayal, not enough love, divorce, etc. was all nonsense, yours or mine, and it's time to stop it."

He had plans to join her in early July but something tragic happened that made him forget his fear of flying and try to book pa.s.sage in June on an Air France plane: Hedda knew she was pregnant when she left New York, and her reason for going to Paris was to sort out her feelings about what to do. In Paris, she discovered that the pregnancy was ectopic and she needed abdominal surgery to repair the damage it had caused. A flurry of telegrams ensued during the ten or so days she was in a Paris hospital, and when she left to convalesce on the Riviera, Saul wrote frantic letters. He told her he had consulted their family physician in New York for rea.s.surance that the French doctors were giving her proper treatment, while she wrote from Juan-les-Pins urging him to stay in New York and finish his work because there was nothing he could do for her. She knew how many commissions he had and how difficult it would be for him to leave them unfinished, and also she knew by now that his work always came first.

He and Hedda had never really discussed the idea of having children. It was unspoken between them that Saul was the equivalent of their child and all their energies and attentions were to be focused on him. He thought they were complete as a couple and did not need the distraction of a child, and besides, children irritated him. When he was forced to be around them, he did not know how to behave. Hedda remembered when the proud mother of a newborn took them into the nursery during a dinner party, insisting that they admire her sleeping baby. Saul rubbed his shoe back and forth on the carpet, then touched his finger to the baby's nose to produce an electric shock. The child woke up screaming, the mother was upset, and Saul (innocently and truthfully) said all he wanted to do was to create a situation where the child would always remember him. He didn't understand his friend Tino Nivola, who had bought an old farmhouse in the village of Springs in eastern Long Island, where "he works three hours a week and the rest of his time brings up his children." Saul's incomprehension of Tino's deep and loving attachment often resulted in cutting remarks that were hurtful to his old friend, who always ignored them and forgave him.

Hedda was thirty-nine in 1949, a time when most women had their children in their early twenties, and thus she was more of an age to be a grandmother than a mother. She and Saul had never really discussed the possibility that they might become parents, and once the pregnancy ended and the scare over her health was gone, they treated it as if it were akin to a ruptured appendix and just got on with their lives.

STEINBERG DIDN'T WANT TO TAKE THE time to go to Europe, nor did he want to spend two or three months there. He was worried about The Art of Living and used it as an excuse to delay the trip and evade his real reason for not wanting to go, the first face-to-face meeting with his parents since his 1944 furlough in Bucharest. "I brace myself for seeing [my] parents," he told Hedda, knowing that no matter what he did or said, it would offend them. He was so afraid of lashing out that he told Hedda he could not see them unless she was with him to act as the go-between: "I can't talk my mind to them because they are able to understand but they'll refuse to. If I'll break down and tell them my mind it'll be a real breakdown for me." Hedda told him that every time she saw Rosa there was constant prying, as Rosa tried to find out how often Saul wrote to each of them. He replied that the best way to distract Rosa was for Hedda to buy her something, preferably a sewing machine. "If it were not for the parents," he concluded, "I'd write you to come home. I wouldn't even go to Europe."

Work was piling up to the point where he would have to take it with him, even though he badly needed a break. For the first time in his life he suffered from insomnia and found himself drinking scotch heavily in order to relax and get to sleep. The increasing amount of business-related details made him realize he would have to find a lawyer he could put on retainer, adding one more person to his professional payroll.

He wasn't thinking clearly when he decided that the best way to avoid or evade all his work and responsibility was to leave New York. "We really have to move to the country," he told Hedda, and this became a recurring theme in his letters. The Nivolas invited him to spend a weekend in their farmhouse in the Springs section of Amagansett; Saul was the only guest, and he spent the time enthralled by Claire, their "really beautiful" daughter, while ignoring her brother, Pietro, "a very dignified little child." The next day he visited Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in their "curious old house and a barn where he paints on the floor. She paints, too, things that look like labels on trunks that have traveled a lot." He told Hedda that they might think of renting a house in Springs for several weeks in September but that Long Island was not for them, because there were too many artists and they needed to be "not near painters."

In a spurt of energy after his Long Island weekend, Steinberg hired Alexander Lindey as his lawyer and made an agreement with Betty Parsons that allowed her to sell his work directly from her gallery for a 25 percent commission, with the rest coming to him. There followed a "very trying evening" with Cesar Civita, who was in New York ostensibly on other business but mostly to persuade Steinberg to renew his contract. Steinberg resisted and went home dead tired to drink a lot of scotch to get to sleep.

He gave himself the brief respite of a week off by not answering the phone or the doorbell at his studio and ignoring his correspondence. He also declined all social engagements and spent his evenings in the apartment "drinking lightly and walking up and down the floor, thinking, worrying," mostly about himself and his emotional state. Even though he did little to change his behavior, his self-a.n.a.lysis was perceptive: he knew that being around people made him "false, scared, formal, compet.i.tive." When he was alone he was "more harmonious" and more "at peace" with himself, because he was able to a.s.sess his actions and interactions honestly and sincerely. Such thinking further convinced him that the only way to lead a peaceful and harmonious life was to leave New York entirely and get a house in the country that had two floors, one for him and one for Hedda. He wanted Hedda to help him make moving plans when they were together in Europe, so they could "do things right" when they returned.

ONE WEEK OF SOLITUDE WAS ALL he could spare and, more truthfully, all he could stand, and he jumped right back into his frenetic, activity-filled schedule. He went to Detroit and was a guest in Alexander Girard's home, "an architect's own dream house." He loved his room, with its Mexican pottery, a small Henry Moore sculpture, an Italian ex-voto, and an Eames chair. On the way home he stopped in Cincinnati to check on the murals before rushing back to New York for a flurry of appointments. In a single day he declined an unnamed department store's invitation to do its Christmas windows, then went to Harper & Brothers to "help their ignorant editors make a blurb" for his book jacket and from there to a luncheon with the businessman roommate on the Queen Mary, who was organizing everything from their reservations for deck chairs to dining room meal seatings. He hurried back to the studio to write the checks to pay his bills, because Miss Elinor had quit, then had to make phone calls in answer to a pile of letters from the Detroit staff because there were too many questions and talking was faster than writing. And after he crammed all that into business hours, he had to return calls to friends such as Betty Parsons, Leo Lerman, and Hawley Truax at The New Yorker. It was a typical New York workday, but it made him feel "like a parasite who hadn't manufactured anything, just blahblahblah."

Naturally-at least to him-several of his teeth chose this time to erupt in infections. The dentist prescribed penicillin, after which he would need at least one extraction, if not two. Penicillin calmed things down, but he worried constantly about a flareup when he boarded the train for another working trip to Detroit, to stay again with the Girards. They entertained him with the most interesting guests they could gather for their elegant dinner parties, but mostly he spent several days on his own, walking around downtown Detroit because the mural needed details of the city itself.

One evening Steinberg was invited to dine at the home of "an architect called Saarinen," who wanted him to think about creating a mural for the Ford Motor Company's research inst.i.tute, which he was designing and building. Steinberg was interested in principle, but for Hedda and not for himself. He left the publicity photos Betty Parsons had made of Hedda's paintings with Saarinen because he wanted him to commission her to make a mural of the machines, motors, electricity, and chemistry that she was then painting. The two men liked each other, especially after they discovered how much they had in common, starting with service in the OSS during the war. Although Hedda's part in the project never came to fruition, Steinberg and Saarinen's friendship endured.

In New York, he deliberately cultivated another new acquaintance, the journalist Ruth Gruber, who was much respected for her dedication to rescuing Jews during World War II and who had been instrumental since the war's end in helping displaced European Jews emigrate, first to Palestine and then to the new nation of Israel. Because of her connections at the highest levels of the United States government and the United Nations, the desperate Steinberg wanted to enlist her to help get his sister and her family out of Romania. Gruber was eager to help and wrote "most convincing letters" to various "big shots." She also took him to meet other influential people, and at "a big party of rich Jews," he saw "more old women and jewels than ever in my life." It was his introduction to the world of Jewish fund-raising at the highest levels, and for the rest of his life he gave as much as he could to every Jewish organization that asked. Gruber was willing to do what she could for Lica and Rica Roman, but she wanted something from Steinberg in return. He groused that he had to go to dinner with her and her publisher because it was "payback" time and she wanted him to design the jacket for her new book. He tried to plead having too much other work before leaving for Europe, but "it's too late now and I promised I'd do it." After a "dull evening," he hastily designed a "dull" book jacket.

HE WAS TO SAIL ON THE Queen Mary on June 21, 1949, arriving in Cherbourg on the twenty-sixth, but his teeth threatened to derail the departure. When he saw the dentist the week before, the dentist told Steinberg to go to a surgeon that very day for an extraction. Instead he went to lunch with Jim Geraghty and got very drunk. After he drank so much liquor and became incoherent with nervousness, Geraghty could barely get him into the surgeon's office. The surgeon examined him and said there was no need for extraction, only for larger doses of penicillin. Steinberg sobered up immediately and got himself back to his office, where he fell into a deep sleep and did not wake up until late afternoon, when he heard Leo Lerman pounding on his door. Then it was back to business as usual. After Lerman there was a succession of visitors that ended with Geraghty, who wanted to make sure he was all right and, if he was, to look at the preliminary drawings of the Detroit murals, as he was interested in buying some for a spread in The New Yorker. Steinberg pulled out all his drawings and behaved as if this were his first meeting of the day with Geraghty, even though he wanted to go home and sleep "for about 20 hours."

In general he got little sleep, because there were too many parties and dinners he had to attend before his departure. Hedda worried about him and chastised him for behaving like "a loose man dancing with depraved de Kooning" at one of Bill and Elaine's raucous parties in their downtown apartment. He insisted that it had been a sedate evening during which he mostly chatted with Wilfredo Lam (whom he liked) and Stanley William Hayter (of whom he was wary). He liked de Kooning, who he insisted was "a nice man," and as that friendship deepened, Steinberg became convinced that through him he had found the key to understanding American abstract painters: "They're primitives."

As the date to sail approached, he was so busy that he limited his social engagements to the good friends he called his "old bores," paramount among them Rene Bouche and Richard Lindner (who always babysat the Steinbergs' cats). Russell Lynes gave a small dinner where Monroe Wheeler and Loren McIver were the only other guests, and Steinberg was able to enjoy the rarity of a serious conversation that was all about art. He was not so enthusiastic when Wheeler gave another dinner where two of the guests, McKnight Kaufer ("a mediocre artist of posters") and Glenway Westcott "kissed on both cheeks like girls." Rosa and Miguel Covarubbias were in town and he had to sit through Miguel's doc.u.mentary film about Bali, "very boring but grand for him." He took Mel and Mark Rothko to lunch at a neighborhood French restaurant, and to keep the conversation flowing with the taciturn Mark, he got them "happy with martinis." Isamu Noguchi, another good friend, was the honored guest at a number of parties before he left New York again "to go away forever," as he always said and never did, so Steinberg went to all his farewell parties. He cut short an evening with Bernard Rudofsky because he didn't feel up to the serious arguments over architecture and city planning that he knew would ensue.

The social encounters were interspersed with a great deal of work and intense reading, all of which combined in ways that eventually showed up in his drawings. From Melville's Moby d.i.c.k to Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, he turned to Havelock Ellis and Balzac. Always searching for "the real America," he read Ring Lardner's short stories and Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, which made him want to jump into the Stravinsky Cadillac and take to the open roads of the American Southeast in search of hillbillies and moonshine. To his great surprise (and delight), aspects of Balzac's Comedie Humaine made him "excited" about the Detroit murals in a way that he had not been excited about any work "in months or years."

He envisioned the murals as a panorama that began with the impression of speed, in keeping with Detroit as the Motor City, where the streets were named Packard, Ford, and Chrysler. The first image was a cl.u.s.ter of cars and trucks roaring off after having been stopped at a traffic light. They led the eye into several very small houses with huge billboards above and behind, all festooned with the word EAT. He was very pleased with "the trick" he used for the next house, "you know, the cute little whitewashed board house with a verandah and a man sitting on a rocking chair." The cute little house became a dozen when he made photostats and pasted them in a sequence so that "same house, same man" became the generic equivalent of every middle-cla.s.s suburb in any American city. They led the eye to an A&P supermarket and a bank that he drew as a "cla.s.sic temple." These were balanced by more photostat images of the middle-cla.s.s house and man, which led directly into the industrial age. Factories were surrounded by thousands of cars that belonged to the workers inside, all of it encircled by "smoke stacks, gazometers, railways, etc. then slums." Steinberg deliberately rendered them in "bad and clumsy drawings" to show the poverty of spirit and misery of life such urbanization inspired. He insisted they had to be "bad" in the sense of sloppy and amateurish, because otherwise such misery "became cute." To enforce his point to the casual viewer, he made blotchy ink spots, left his fingerprints scattered here and there, and put some of the drawings on the floor so he could dirty them by stepping on them and leaving the imprint of his rubber-heeled work shoes. To take this section of the mural one degree further away from reality, he did not use the original drawings but had them reproduced photographically. After this he veered back into repet.i.tions of the "cute house" (as he was now calling it) until the viewer's eye stopped at a Moorish gas station, which Steinberg used to introduce a city that was all brownstones and shops until it came to a "6th Avenue like" center. Here, at street level he had movie theaters, drugstores, burlesque houses, and Italian restaurants, while above them were the offices of everyone from dentists and chiropodists to tree surgeons and pa.s.sport photographers. This would lead to a skysc.r.a.per "with a fancy store on street level and about 500 floors of offices." He planned to exaggerate the height and to shape the building like a cathedral, with windows evenly distributed throughout and showing activity inside them. After this there would be a plaza with a World War I monument and a post office "with socialist murals, etc." He planned to complete the murals with views of the rich suburbs and cross-sections of the houses that populated them, in which the carefully measured and modulated activities of the wealthy and pampered residents could serve as a counterpoint to the frenetic activity that began the panorama.

He was so excited to have the project fully envisioned and mostly drawn that he apologized to Hedda for writing an entire letter about it without commenting on her health. While recovering from the ectopic pregnancy, Hedda fell sick again with an unnamed ailment. Saul's only comment was to say he was sorry and would phone their family physician, Dr. Hurd, to see if he had any useful advice for the French doctors.

By the time he sailed on June 21, the couple's letters had become a terse and tense exchange, with Hedda scolding him for destructive behavior, particularly heavy drinking. She accused him of using liquor as an escape from life, but he disagreed, saying that the only time he drank was to avoid the terror of the tooth extraction. He did agree with her "about the stupid boring results of drinking" and hoped that when they returned in August, everything would be conducive to "a year of good work with very little drinking or smoking."

He was so worried by the coldness of her last few letters that he proposed a new way to demonstrate how much he loved her. She should go to a European city small enough for him to run into her as if by accident, and they would pretend to be strangers meeting for the first time. He would court her for several days, until ("because I couldn't take this game [any longer]") he would end it by asking her to marry him. Even in such a love letter, he could not resist bragging about how well he had worked that day: "I made a big skysc.r.a.per with a few persons jumping from the roof. Entire families falling with dignity."

FAMILIES FALLING FROM ROOFS COULD WELL have been the metaphor for his meeting with his parents in Paris. Moritz was silent to the point of catatonia, overwhelmed by the variety and color of daily life in Paris after the drab monotony of Bucharest, but mostly rendered speechless by Rosa's constant litany of complaints. Nothing pleased her; she even complained about the gracious hospitality of Hedda's family in snide and oblique ways that made it all but impossible to contradict her. Saul was stunned to hear her bemoan all that she had given up and left behind in Bucharest, only to fall into such constrained circ.u.mstances in a city that was supposed to be the most comfortable and cultured in the world. Unspoken but inferred was her only son's lack of concern for her plight and his callous indifference to her needs. Hedda sensed that he was at the breaking point and quickly invented imaginary projects for which he needed to go to the South of France and Italy. Instead they hid out for a week in the studio she had been renting in one of the outer arrondiss.e.m.e.nts, far from her brother's residence, and which Rosa and Moritz knew nothing about. Being there gave them time to see friends and visit galleries and for Saul to tend to details pertaining to work in New York that arose after his departure. They resurfaced long enough to take Rosa and Moritz to a spa, but it did not measure up to Rosa's memories of holidays by the Black Sea and was not successful. They knew they would have to do something drastic, because Paris as a final destination was not working out.

It was a relief to head to Milan, where they renewed acquaintances with colleagues from the Politecnico and discussed the possibility of future collaborations in architectural design and film. Ada was living alone in Milan after an "Italian divorce" in which she and her husband simply agreed to go their separate ways, since the country had no legal divorce. Saul decided that he would have to do more than send the occasional check, and he helped her financially for the rest of her life with regular contributions of money. He and Hedda left Milan for Bergamo and the first of a number of pleasant visits with Ernesto Rogers, and then they went to Venice. Saul took rooms at the Grand Hotel for himself and Hedda and also for Aldo and Bianca, who joined them for a happy reunion. Saul spent much of the reunion with Aldo sitting in the piazza throwing out various ideas and possibilities for work that Aldo could do in New York. He was determined to get Aldo a visa for a long stay, but nothing concrete came of it.

By mid-August, after a meandering journey through the Alpes-Maritimes and the Alsatian route des vins, Saul and Hedda were back in Paris, unsure of what to do about a permanent home for Moritz and Rosa and eager to escape from their clutching neediness. They decided that the parents had to go to Nice, where there was a sizable contingent of Romanian Jewish refugees from their old neighborhood, who could offer companionship and, better yet, commiseration. Saul had to harden himself to overcome Rosa's initial recalcitrance, but shortly after, the senior Steinbergs made the move.

Hedda had been away from home for almost ten months, and she wanted to go back to New York and get to work. Saul was not all that eager to resume the life he led there, but now there were even more people who depended on him financially, and he knew he needed to keep the money coming in to support them.

That fall he was p.r.o.ne to a general malaise. He cut his three-pack-a-day nicotine habit down to almost nothing; he was not sure if he had "tobacco poisoning or mental stuff," but he was afraid to go to a doctor to find out. He was trying to ama.s.s a collection of drawings and cartoons that would a.s.sure a steady income for the better part of a year, but the work was "hard and depressing." It would have been easy and even enjoyable to do "variations on the same theme," but none of the publications who bought his work wanted what they called "repet.i.tion." Coming up with a single good idea gave him little satisfaction, because he had to change his thinking completely in order to find the next original one. He thought of himself as working and working, but "inertia" still came back, and with it insomnia. All his obligations seemed insurmountable, and he had no energy to deal with them. "I'd rather lie awake at night over unanswered letters than make the effort to write," he told Aldo. Still, when he added up all he had done, a partial list showed "To Vogue 6 large, 8 Venice Medium, 7 Paris Color, 6 railways, 13 misc. Total 40. Gave Glamour 17 dr." There were even more that went to The New Yorker, plus designs that went to the two fabric companies, Patterson and Stehli, and a host of other smaller commissions. He had achieved his objective for the year, and there was enough money coming in to support all his obligations.

Steinberg's parents in Nice. (ill.u.s.tration credit 13.1) Saul and Hedda went off to celebrate Thanksgiving, Steinberg's favorite American holiday, with Sandy and Louisa Calder in their Roxbury, Connecticut, farmhouse. It was the first of many holiday invitations with the Calders that they accepted, for they loved the way Sandy and Louisa and their daughters gathered all the guests in the kitchen to eat and drink to excess, to dance, sing, and in general make merry. Steinberg loved Calder, "the dancing man," and on one of these happy occasions, when Saul could not hear what Sandy was telling him, he sat on his knee to hear him better. "I thought afterwards that I had not sat on a man's knee in sixty years! And that this was the only man so happy and so innocent to give me and everybody the simple and loving familiarity." It was exactly what he needed to get him to the end of a dispiriting year, and he returned to New York energized for the usual round of holiday festivities.

Unfortunately, there was no prospect of any new, different, and interesting work on his horizon, only more of the same for the usual publications, and the new decade seemed likely to start as the old one had ended. Several years earlier, when Steinberg first went to work for The New Yorker, Jim Geraghty astutely a.s.sessed his personality by saying he needed "excitement." It was never truer than it was in 1950.

CHAPTER 14.

THE ONLY HAPPILY MARRIED COUPLE.

As artists, the Steinbergs pursue their separate ways ... Both want to create a picture of America, but not the same picture. Says Hedda: "I am getting rid of images." Says Saul: "I am unfit to do anything not funny."

At a party one night, Saul was introduced to an awestruck young architect who told him that he and Hedda had a near mythical reputation as the only happily married couple in New York. That a total stranger could express what so many people believed showed how well the very public couple kept their personal lives private. The architect made his remark at a time when their professional reputations were in the ascendant and they were too busy dealing with them to focus on their personal differences, which were mostly due to Saul's inability to express emotion in person and his brief affairs and longer liaisons. However, whatever went on within the marriage stayed there, known only to the two of them.

The beautiful Hedda and the charismatic Saul certainly made a glamorous couple, admired and envied in equal measure. Most of the people they considered their friends were luminaries in the international worlds of high society, arts and letters, politics and culture, and increasingly within the rarefied atmosphere of the financial world, as wealthy collectors competed to buy their work. To outsiders looking in, their life was a constant round of enviable parties, dinners, country weekends, and long European holidays. With their professional reputations soaring, they were sought after for interviews by all the publications that mattered, and they were on almost every list of "promising" or "important" figures in the art world.

Much of the hoopla began when Hedda's photograph appeared in Life in January 1950, the only woman among fourteen male artists, all of them lumped together under the sobriquet "the Irascibles." The name was originally an adjective used to describe a disparate collection of painters and sculptors in an article that proclaimed them an "Irascible Group of Advanced Artists." It became, for better or worse, their trademark when the critic Emily Genauer wrote an editorial for the New York Herald Tribune that grouped them together as a de facto school. Actually, the Irascibles could trace their origin to the first of a series of meetings organized by Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt asking other artists to join in composing a letter to the president of the Metropolitan Museum protesting the conservative makeup of a jury selected to judge an exhibition of contemporary art. The Irascibles declared the judges hostile to every form of "advanced art" but to abstract expressionism in particular.

Hedda befriended Newman and Reinhardt at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery when she first arrived in New York, and she liked and respected them both, as did Saul when she introduced him. She thought Newman was "politically savvy about publicity" and admired Reinhardt for being "an abstract artist in the 30's before everybody else, a very good political cartoonist and a ... man with backbone." Both painters wanted to a.s.sure maximum publicity for their campaign to get the Met to open its doors to modern art, so they invited thirty artists to the round-table meetings, but only eighteen attended. Hedda, as a painter, was invited, but Saul, seen primarily as a cartoonist and draftsman, was not. If he was miffed by his exclusion, he never expressed it to her. They both agreed wholeheartedly with the "social [that is, political] agenda" espoused by Newman, Reinhardt, and Adolph Gottlieb (who wrote most of the letter), so Hedda went to the meetings on behalf of herself and Saul. She thought he should have been invited, but he was too busy with the many commissions that were bringing increasingly large sums of money. Fleur Cowles was prominent among those who wanted to buy his work, as she was eager to woo him for her new magazine, Flair.

Although other women attended the Irascibles' round-table discussions (among them Janice Biala and Louise Bourgeois), Hedda was the only one who showed up for the photo session staged by Nina Leen, along with the fourteen male artists brave enough to sign the letter and risk being photographed. Hedda didn't hesitate to embrace the cause, because "in those days I signed any form of protest." As the only woman in the photo, and a strikingly beautiful one at that, she was from that moment on most often cla.s.sified as an abstract expressionist, despite her insistence on two major points: the Irascibles in the famous photograph were "not a school and it never was," and the only thing they had in common was that most of them were represented by Betty Parsons and "were all considered avant-garde."

Leen's photograph was indeed striking, with Hedda Sterne dressed all in black and standing at the top of a pyramid formed by the fourteen artists seated below her. The photographer staged "the architecture" before the artists arrived by arranging fourteen chairs with name tags indicating where each man was to sit. Hedda arrived late, to the consternation of Leen, who thought she was not coming and did not have a chair marked for her. Hedda knew the omission "was not deliberate," as Leen quickly found something for her to stand on which posed her on an elevated platform at the center of the photo and made her the focal point. The entire session lasted about ten minutes, but reverberations from it never ended: when Hedda first saw the picture, she said, "In terms of my career, it's probably the worst thing that ever happened to me." She never changed her mind.

Despite the fact that her method and technique were constantly changing, from then on she was branded an abstract expressionist, which meant that all too often her work was labeled and dismissed. Throughout the 1950s, when art historians looked for "sweeping trends" to define the contemporary scene and painters were embracing "signature styles, such as Pollock's drips and Newman's zips," Hedda's process was one of "uninterrupted flux." While critics often deemed her willingness to embrace new ways of creating art "inconsistent," Betty Parsons defended the constant change: "Hedda was always searching, never satisfied. She had many ways; most artists just have one way to go."

Like Saul Steinberg, Hedda Sterne was primarily interested in process. She could well have been describing how he approached a drawing when she described how she approached a painting: "Painting for me is a process of simultaneous understanding and explaining. I try to approach my subject uncluttered by esthetic prejudices. I put it on canvas in order to explain it to myself, yet the result should reveal something plus." When she did speak of Steinberg's work, she said that what she most admired about it was his "ability to make ideas concrete with a symbol." For her, the mystery hovering over his work was always "where did this come from?"

The idea of process was one they talked about constantly. Throughout the years they lived together, Sterne and Steinberg never lacked for conversation about making art, although they seldom spoke specifically about what they were working on at the time. Hedda explained how they were "filled with ideas, and even at the worst of times, when he was at his most remote, conversation about art was without end."

Both were avid readers, and writing techniques often enriched their conversations about the process of making art. Sterne was keen on philosophy, particularly Schopenhauer and Hegel, and later Confucius, Lao-tzu, and other Eastern thinkers. She loved poetry, her favorites ranging from Rilke to Walt Whitman. She read fiction, but not to the extent that Steinberg did. His tastes were all-embracing and eclectic, veering from Stendhal and Manzoni to contemporary Italian novelists like Carlo Gadda, who wrote in dialect, to American regionalists such as James T. Farrell and Erskine Caldwell. He reread the Russian novelists repeatedly, from Gogol (his favorite) and Dostoevsky (whom he liked) to Lermontov and Turgenev (to whom he accorded lesser attention). He read through Balzac's Comedie Humaine, engrossed in the turmoil and travails of the characters, and was moved by some of Zola's novels, especially those that dealt with social inequities, like Germinal. He liked to read American history, particularly of the Civil War period and after, and he was keenly interested in the sociological and cultural studies written after World War II that he thought would help him to understand his adopted country.

Hedda Sterne and Saul Steinberg worked devotedly at the visual arts every day, sometimes for ten to twelve hours at a stretch, but when they paused, words became their chosen form of communication. They were constantly seeking to enrich their art through reading, and if there was one defining quality about their work in the immediate postwar decade, it was that they strove to make others see visual truths about their subjects that were hitherto hidden or unclear.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER LIFE SINGLED OUT Hedda Sterne as "one of our most promising young painters," Vogue followed by placing her at number 11 on the magazine's list of "53 Living American Artists [to watch]." The article described her as "the 34-year-old abstractionist who has in paint some of the airy balances of Emily d.i.c.kinson's poetry." Hedda set out to read d.i.c.kinson's poetry to try to understand what the writer meant by the comparison. Another glowing review soon followed in the New York Times, describing her show at Betty Parsons's gallery as composed of "extremely handsome" abstractions that "const.i.tute an authentic and impressive doc.u.ment of our society."

Hedda was pleased with the public response to her painting, but the att.i.tude she expressed toward her own work during the war years had crystallized and hardened since her marriage. "Your work interests me much, much more than my own," she wrote to Saul during the war, as she described the pleasure derived from a long, ten- to fourteen-hour day spent painting for her own pleasure and with no thought of presenting it for public consumption or comment. After the war, as her reputation rose steadily, she clung even more steadfastly to the idea of art as an example of personal expression rather than as a product meant for the world of commerce. In the mid-1950s, after an evening in the company of Katherine Kuh, the influential curator of modern art at the Art Inst.i.tute of Chicago; the architect-designer Frederick Kiesler; and the painter Richard Lindner, all of whom she counted among her closest friends, she told Saul that she thought their "poor little ambitions: were 'Lamentable!' " As were her own, she was quick to add, especially when she had a personal encounter with "an element of the public or of museums." Whenever "real people" or a faceless inst.i.tution became involved with her painting, she believed that "all the magic disappears." She would have been content to paint quietly just for her own pleasure, and as a "kept woman" (her semi-ironic description of how she was supported by her husbands in her two marriages) she could have done so. However, the circ.u.mstances of the early years of her marriage to Steinberg, when she was half of one of the art world's most dynamic couples, would not allow her to do so.

In 1951 she and Saul were featured together in Life in an article whose headline was "Steinberg and Sterne: Romanian-Born Cartoonist and Artist-Wife Ambush the World with Pen and Paintbrush." Glamorous photos of the couple highlighted a large selection of their work, and the accompanying article was built on the several fanciful myths about his life that Steinberg had earlier created. Here he claimed that his penchant for drawing had begun when, as a young child, he watched a forger who lived in his Bucharest neighborhood make official-looking stamps and labels. He repeated the story of how he stamped his underwear "secret" while in the OSS, and added the delightfully fanciful story that the only work he did in China was to teach the peasants how to wiggle their ears. Hedda did her share of mythmaking, claiming that dancing had been her first love and she had studied it in Europe, where she had also been a stage designer. She claimed to be just returning to a career as a painter. Describing where and how they worked, Steinberg told the interviewer that every morning he went to his studio, where he often spent whole days doing nothing but lying down. Sterne said she worked at home "amid pebbles and firemen's hats." The only truth in their comments came when both admitted to a fascination with the United States, "he by the habits of people, she by machines and towering structures."

The Life article appeared after another period of frenetic work and travel. Saul's output during the first six months of 1950 earned enough for him to follow his usual custom of taking the summer off, but then an intriguing offer came. Alan Jay Lerner and Vincente Minnelli were filming An American in Paris, with Gene Kelly playing an artist there on the GI Bill. Someone at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer came up with the highly original idea of hiring Steinberg's drawing hand for close-ups of scenes featuring Kelly as he was supposedly painting, so Saul and Hedda went to Los Angeles instead of Europe. They rented the Bel Air home of Annabella, the French actress and ex-wife of actor Tyrone Power, and were eager to settle into the Hollywood film scene. Saul's hand was supposed to became a movie star, but the rest of him lasted exactly three days.

He thought it was only his hand that they wanted to film, ostensibly drawing something amorphous, unrecognizable, and mostly unfilmed, until he read the letter of agreement he was expected to sign. He was to create "certain works of art, paintings, sketches, etc.," all of which were to become the exclusive property of the studio, to be used to "exploit and exhibit" the movie. He was also expected to give the rights to use his "name, voice, and likeness for advertising and exploitation," in perpetuity. And after he surrendered all rights to his own work, he was to understand and agree that the studio was giving him "special, unique, unusual, [and] extraordinary privileges," and if he breached them, he could be held liable for damages.

Saul told Aldo that, having been courted with "great promises of 'a free hand, do what you want,' " he spent his three days on the set dealing with "gli eterni stronzi [the usual a.s.sholes] who make Technicolor musicals, stupid stuff." He thanked the G.o.d who made it possible for him to find work elsewhere so he could refuse this contract, but he was still upset about "all those dollars I didn't pocket." It led to several gloomy days over "the conflict between money and honest work.

After that he decided that he liked California, particularly the "excellent climate" and an American landscape different from anything he had experienced in Vermont, Cape Cod, or the eastern end of Long Island. The climate was so seductive that he imagined living there forever, if not for all the "huge spiders, deadly poison" that he was sure infested the entire region. As was usual wherever he went, interesting people wanted to meet him. He met such diverse personalities as Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy, and the acerbic Oscar Levant and formed a lasting friendship with Billy Wilder based on their similar sardonic wit, Mittel-European sensibility, and ironic perception of American culture and society.

Ray and Charles Eames became good friends and colleagues with whom Steinberg enjoyed several collaborations. When Charles saw some of the drawings Steinberg was making of Los Angeles, he wanted them for a movie, but the idea was abandoned when other projects took precedence, particularly one that became a spoof with public repercussions. Steinberg was particularly taken with the Eameses' 1948 chrome and plastic chair, and he drew the outline of a big black cat lounging on one of them. He graced another with a naked woman's torso similar to the nudes he drew in a bathtub and on the bathroom's walls. Everyone who saw Steinberg's nude-woman chair found it amusing, so the Eameses included it in a 1951 "Design for Living" show of their work at the Long Beach Museum, where it quickly caused a local scandal. The museum had a new director, whose relationship with her staff was colored by their affection for the former director, who had curated the show. The staff rebelled when the new director declared the chair to be "vulgar" and instructed them to turn it toward the wall so that only the undecorated back was visible. Each day when the new director arrived, she turned the chair to the wall, and immediately afterward someone on the staff turned it to face outward. Naturally the local papers had a field day, and the story soon became grist for regional and national amus.e.m.e.nt while viewers debated the pros and cons of obscenity and vulgarity and what const.i.tuted just plain art.

WHEN THE LEASE ON ANNABELLA'S Bel Air house ended, Hedda took the train to New York while Saul boarded a bus that took him first to Las Vegas and then across the midsection of the United States. It gave him time not only to see the vast s.p.a.ces of the American Plains states and to try to fathom what influence those who lived there might bring to bear on the collective American psyche, but also to think about the series of drawings he wanted to make about his California experience. He was having trouble finishing them to his satisfaction, because capturing their "reality" was "too peculiar." When he tried to describe what he had seen on the streets and highways of Southern California, he compared it to a circus, saying it was just as difficult to draw because he had to "keep making an effort not to fall into cliches." He was eventually satisfied with the California drawings, which became a series t.i.tled "The Coast" when The New Yorker published them in January 1951.

Back in New York, he resumed the annual pattern of doing commercial work for the first three months of the year. One of the most lucrative but irritating commissions was a Neiman-Marcus catalogue cover and a design for the department store's wrapping paper and other packaging. When the store's art department, with the blessing of Stanley Marcus, made changes without Steinberg's approval, he was furious. After that he was careful to retain full legal control of work done for Marcus (who had become a serious collector of his work and liked to think of himself as a good friend). There were various disagreements in the years they worked together, but Steinberg's decisions about how his work would be presented were always final, even though Marcus was occasionally reluctant to accept them.

At the end of March, confident that he had earned enough to spend the next three to five months on his own work, Steinberg and Sterne boarded a transatlantic liner that took them to Italy. The filmmaker Carlo Ponti (not yet married to Sophia Loren) was on board and through a mixup ended up having to pay for a supper eaten by the three of them. Ponti insisted on a photograph of himself with Saul and Hedda as reimburs.e.m.e.nt for their share, and they obliged. They thought that would be the end of having to deal with Ponti, but on one of their first nights in Naples they met him by accident and he insisted that they dine together. They decided that he was not one of their favorite people, nor was Naples one of their favorite cities. They thought it was all robbery, graft, and "lousy food." It was all "a little too much like Romania," so they decided to head for someplace quiet where they had never been before and were unlikely to encounter anyone they knew.

Sicily offered the isolation and quiet they craved. They toured small towns and ruined temples for several days before settling in Palermo and setting up to work in a quiet hotel. For diversion they made brief forays or took longer ferry trips to the Italian mainland to explore southern Italian regions. In April they went to Florence, where their friend the American artist Richard Blow lent them the Villa Piazza Calda, a Renaissance structure he had bought and restored in 1927, where he had subsequently revived the art of pietre dure, the Florentine mosaic art that combined marble with colored stones. Steinberg thanked Blow for his generous hospitality with an especially fancy diploma that sported elaborate curliques and flourishes and a stylized green border similar to those that embellished stock certificates.

Steinberg and Sterne used Piazza Calda as the jumping-off point for short trips throughout central and northern Italy, often in the company of Aldo Buzzi, who was with them for several weeks. They went to Capri and San Remo, both of which were as beautiful as they had been touted, and then it was farewell to Aldo in Mantua as he changed for a train that took him home to Milan while they went on to France. Saul girded himself for visiting his parents in Nice by stopping first to gamble for several days at the casinos in Monte Carlo.

HEDDA MADE HERSELF A WILLING BUFFER in all of Saul's dealings with Rosa and Moritz. She took care of fulfilling every need or desire (usually Rosa's) conveyed in their letters. Hedda was not fond of shopping but spent countless hours and sometimes days looking for just the right winter coat or for stockings and underwear that fit Rosa's exacting specifications yet never met them. She may have chafed at having to shop and then ship to Paris whatever Rosa wanted, as often as several times each month, but she kept her feelings to herself and took care of everything so that Saul seldom had to deal directly with his parents. However, he took an active role in trying to make sure that Lica and her family had the best chance of receiving the few things she requested.

The government of the PRR (People's Republic of Romania) had inst.i.tuted harsh new restrictions on gifts from relatives outside the country, so it became frustratingly difficult to help her. Each citizen was allowed to receive one package per month weighing one kilogram or less, which meant that most relatives no longer attempted to send goods but sent money instead. Funds had to be funneled through organizations that were supposed to be honest and reliable, but unfortunately, once the money crossed the Romanian border, this was often not the case. Frequently the amount was greatly reduced or, more often, never arrived at all; medicines, such as the ones Lica was desperate to have for her husband's undiagnosed ailments and her small son's scarlet fever, were never received.

The emotional travails of Lica's family's emigration swooped up and down like a roller coaster with no end in sight. There was a brief moment of hope when Lica received notice that her house had been officially allocated to another family, which in Romanian terms meant that her family had been cleared for a departure that could come at any time. They prepared to go by packing the few possessions they would be allowed to take and giving away many of their furnishings and most of their winter clothing, for Lica was certain they would be sent to Israel. When several months pa.s.sed without official notification and no one came to claim their house, once again they resigned themselves to staying. "We are extremely stressed out by this way of departing," she told her brother.

Rosa continued to make her usual peremptory requests, all conveyed in the most wheedling and irritating letters. Hedda shopped a number of times to try to find the right winter coat and then shipped several, but none pleased Rosa. Fearing her son's ire over her pickiness, she changed tack and asked first for a new house in Nice, then adjusted her sights to a new apartment, and then decided to settle for household things, starting with a new refrigerator. Saul did what he always did: he fired off a check. What he dreaded most about the coming visit was answering the questions he knew Rosa would ask about what he was doing for his many relatives, both those waiting to leave Bucharest and those already in Israel. It was already a subject of general conversation in the immediate family, with Lica stuck in Romania and worrying about how much her brother had to earn to support them and their cousins as well, who were asking for money and then complaining about the amount they received.

The pleas for help took many forms and also came from relatives who had made it to Israel. One well-off cousin hid his money in high-interest European accounts and claimed he did not want to use it because the exchange rate was unfavorable, so could Saul please send him "a donut maker, a refrigerator, and some radios"? All these were to be a loan until the exchange rate stabilized, but until then he preferred to use Saul's money rather than his own. Another cousin asked for enough to buy a truck, a taxi, or enough laundry machines to open a laundromat. Most of the others simply asked for gifts of money in heartrending letters that described poverty, illness, and deprivation. Saul Steinberg honored every request, sending enough goods or money to fulfill each request entirely or to come as close to it as he could. And if people asked a second or third time, he sent even more than they requested.

HE HAD A GOOD EXCUSE NOT to stay long with his parents in Nice: he had to go to London to meet Roland Penrose for discussions about a solo exhibition of his work that was scheduled for one year later at the Inst.i.tute of Contemporary Arts. Penrose had founded the ICA in 1946, along with Herbert Read and several others who wanted to offer the British public something different from the traditional kinds of art anointed by the Royal Academy. He was an early booster of Pica.s.so and Jackson Pollock and featured both in one of the ICA's first shows; he was a friend of Max Ernst, Henry Moore, and Joan Miro, all of whom he featured soon after and whose work he collected in his own impressive private collection. Penrose was married to Lee Miller, the American model who became an avant-garde photographer before distinguishing herself as a fearless war correspondent. They had just bought Farley Farm, 120 acres in a small village in the same area of Suss.e.x where Virginia Woolf made her last home, and they invited Steinberg to come for the weekend.

Steinberg took an immediate liking to Miller and Penrose, and they to him. Penrose could not find enough superlatives to praise Steinberg's talent and was eager to boost his reputation and make him feel welcome in England by introducing him to other artists and writers. Miller had been in Romania just after the war, and Steinberg listened avidly to the few things she told him about her experiences. Being at Farley Farm was a magical time for Steinberg. It was a house "filled with art and crammed with crazy people," where he got fresh air and exercise, drank too much liquor and ate too much food for the good of his digestion, and observed with slight puzzlement the constant parade of exotic bohemian guests who drifted casually in and out. It might have been better if he had ended his tour of the British Isles there, for then he might not have taken away such a negative impression of most of England, Scotland, and the two Irelands.

His first impression of London was from one of the city's red double-decker buses, where everything looked "trim and shining," with no remaining vestiges of the war's ravages. A side trip to Brighton and Rye reminded him of an "old fashioned Coney Island." After eight hours on a train to Edinburgh, he could not wait to leave one of the "corniest" cities he had ever seen, full of "King Arthur, legendary heroes, fake castles, etc.... Roman temples made out of asphalt." He promised himself to "think of the good parts of Edinburgh some other time." He took the train to Glasgow, the ferry to Larne, and the train to Belfast, which he liked best, until he realized that as it was Sunday and raining too heavily to leave the hotel, he had nothing to do because all the pubs were closed.

His next stop was Dublin, where his first night was pa.s.sed at a B&B filled with Irish Americans or the English, who came to gorge on eggs and b.u.t.ter. The next day he decamped for the Shelbourne, Dublin's best hotel, and the day after that he took the ferry to Liverpool and went back to London. He stayed there for several days, determined to visit London's eighteen railway stations, all of which he deemed "beautiful." He went to the theater to see A Winter's Tale, and although he was never a fan of Shakespeare, he was surprised by how much he liked both the play and the theatergoing experience. On his last day in London he went to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he was entranced with the various sorts of "junque" that always appealed to him-best of all, "Queen Victoria's banquet printed and embossed on silk." The weather had turned so tropically hot that he drank beer to keep himself "alive." As for the food, it was "so bad I can hardly touch it." He had had enough of Anglo-Saxon att.i.tudes, and it was time to go.

He went to Brussels for a few days, eager to put the British Isles behind him. Dublin and Belfast had reminded him of "the Eastern-type poverty" of his native Romania, and the only reason he stayed as long as he did in Edinburgh was "out of perversity ... to see how it's possible to build in such an ugly and stupid way." The more he traveled around the British Isles, the more he realized how much he loved Italy. From then on he visited Britain only in connection with exhibitions of his work.

AFTER BRUSSELS, HE TOOK THE TRAIN to Paris, where he helped Hedda pack up for the boat trip home, including the new trove of rubber stamps he had picked up in his travels throughout Italy, France, and England. It wasn't the happiest of his transatlantic crossings, for he was despondent throughout the voyage over having surrendered the Central Park South studio as an economy measure. He and Hedda had spent more money than he expected, and he knew he had to start earning as quickly as possible, so he fretted that it would take a month or longer to find a new works.p.a.ce. This worry paled the minute they landed in New York, when a threatening crisis presented itself: the navy wanted to recall him to active duty because of the Korean War, and he was ordered to go to Washington. "I'm putting up a fight," he told Aldo, and apparently he was successful, for he was not recalled, although he was not officially discharged from the Navy Reserve until three years later, on October 15, 1954.

By the end of October 1951, he had been working steadily from the apartment and was so tired that he needed another vacation, which he simply could not afford to take. One of the more intriguing invitations for commercial work came from the impresario Lincoln Kirstein, who wanted him to design sets for a ballet ch.o.r.eographed by George Balanchine. To prepare himself, he went to one ballet performance after another. Otherwise, everything had fallen into its usual pattern: "I smoke, I drink and work. I don't even know if I'm happy." He got what he thought would be the vacation he needed in late December through early January 1952, when he went to Palm Beach, Florida, to make drawings for Life and The New Yorker. He thought it was "frightful in its ugliness, stupidity, and vulgarity," and disliked intensely having to draw "ugly things" that were akin to "p.o.r.nography."

He was tired of the peripatetic life, and tired of living in a small apartment without enough s.p.a.ce for either himself or Hedda to work well. Since their stay at the Villa Piazza Calda and after his visit to Farley Farm, he was more insistent than ever that they needed to set up a permanent home. He had temporarily given up the idea of moving to the country, because of the sheer impracticality of living far from his major sources of income. Perhaps in the future they could think about a place for weekends and vacations, but what they needed now was something in the city with s.p.a.ce enough for each to work, s.p.a.ce for them to reciprocate the hospitality of their many friends, and s.p.a.ce to welcome particularly Aldo (although he never came), whom Saul was eager to help professionally. Also, an increasing parade of strangers were being sent their way by European friends who thought they should all know each other. Penrose and Miller sent the p.r.i.c.kly Sonia, widow of George Orwell, who spent the evening at a posh dinner party in high dudgeon after she learned that the Saul who sat next to her was not Bellow but only an artist she had never heard of named Steinberg.

AND SO SAUL AND HEDDA BEGAN to talk seriously about how much s.p.a.ce they would need so that both could work at home. It would take a very large apartment to accommodate them, and soon they realized they would be better off in a house. When they examined their finances, it became clear that Steinberg, with all his obligations, could not swing the deal on his own. Fred Stafford, who was still hovering over Hedda to make sure that she was financially secure, stepped in and provided the money for them to buy a four-story town house at 179 East 71st Street. Steinberg was so eager to move in on January 31, 1952, that he cut the Palm Beach stay short by several days. He was excited about settling down for the first time in his life, looking forward to becoming a solid citizen of his adopted patria, a landowner and payer of property taxes.

The house was one in a row of brownstones on the north side of 71st Street, a quiet, tree-lined block between Lexington and Third Avenues. The first floor became their public area, a large room that combined a kitchen, dining, and living room. The focal point was a large oval table that could seat twelve comfortably and several more at a pinch. At the rear, French doors opened onto a walled garden. Two other points of interest were the large white porcelain sink and ruby-red enamel stove with two ovens; over each Hedda hung the two diplomas Saul made to proclaim her expertise in dishwashing and cooking. Throughout the next decade, Steinberg filled the room with the work of his friends, including a life-size white plaster nude by Tino Nivola, a Calder mobile, a painting by Josef Albers, two Giacometti drawings, a small dressmaker's dummy, and some of his own "constructions" that resembled bits and pieces of pianos and clocks. They installed enormous flat wooden files to hold their work in an organized manner (the first time they had enough s.p.a.ce for such a luxury), and on them they placed mattresses and pillows so they could climb up and lie down to nap or read after eating.

Saul took over the second floor, using the larger room at the rear of the house for his studio and keeping the one at the front for overflow storage until he found a billiard table that reminded him so much of the one he had played on at Il Grillo in Milan that he had to buy it. He thought he worked better once he was able to walk back and forth between the two rooms, alternating between playing billiards and making drawings. On the top floor, they kept the larger room at the rear of the house for their bedroom, because it was quiet, while Hedda crammed all her painting equipment into the smaller room at the front. It faced the sunny south, but she managed to work all day long despite the light that streamed in.

They were both proud of the house and wanted to show it to friends, so they began to give dinner parties once or twice a week, seating a dozen or more guests around the big oval table. Although the guests were an eclectic mix, most were what Hedda called "Saul's New Yorker people," and they were the ones most often invited. Saul was at his most relaxed and comfortable with James Geraghty, Joseph Mitch.e.l.l, Geoffrey h.e.l.lman, A. J. Liebling, Niccol Tucci, Charles Addams, Sam Cobean, and "their wives or girl friends." Their other dinner guests were people they had known since their earliest days in New York, and unlike the glittering invitations from wealthy collectors and patrons of the arts that Saul was accepting more and more frequently, only their closest old friends were invited to sit around Hedda's kitchen table. From the performing arts, these included Sasha Schneider, Uta Hagen, and Herbert Berghof; from the art world, their closest friends were Richard Lindner and Rene Bouche, and after them Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Berte and Bernard Rudofsky. Iris Barry brought them news of film, while Louisa Calder and Denise Hare listened intently as Sandy and David entranced the company with talk about sculpture. During their summers in Wellfleet, Saul and Hedda had befriended Marcel and Connie Breuer, with whom they exchanged dinners there and in New York. There was never a lack of conversation at the table, but their favorite evenings were those when everyone sat around until the wee hours listening to Harold Rosenberg declaiming while his wife, May Tabak Rosenberg, acted as moderator between him and Steinberg. May liked best the dinners when it was just the four of them and Harold and Saul pontificated like "two Irish rabbis."

Rosenberg was fast becoming the one friend whose "contagious intelligence" engaged Steinberg's completely. Steinberg was enthralled by Rosenberg's "rare gift for inventing and discovering ideas in your presence ... Talking with him was always a surprise. One didn't quite know what the talk was about, but it was extremely precise and efficient." Rosenberg was a towering presence physically as well, over six feet tall and with a sweeping but awkward stride caused by "a leg that would no longer bend." Steinberg, whose height was just below Rosenberg's shoulder, would not let him begin to talk until he sat down, so they could have "a conversation of equals."

Interspersed with the New York friends were the many Europeans whose hospitality they enjoyed in Europe and were eager to return in New York. Many of Steinberg's Italia