Reflections and Shadows

Rating:
Summary: Musings on life and art
Review: Published after his death in 1999, this is a meditation based on a series of interviews of Steinberg by Buzzi. Beginning with his childhood and youth in Romania, through his wartime experience in Italy and his maturity in the United States, Steinberg muses with an acute visual sense, appropriate for an artist. The book is illustrated with his drawings.

His ideas about influences on art are insightful. as he describes early photographers "inspired by the paintings of Delacroix and Ingres", to his thought that Bacon "clearly derives from the Polaroid". I was intrigued by his suggestion that the use of industrial paints in American art occurred because of poor artists used cold-water flats as studios, "and to make them livable they had to scrape and paint the walls, doors and windows, and floors . . . and this led them to work on a large scale, to use industrial paints, such as gold or silver on radiators, new materials". His description of the New York City taxi cab of the `40's as created out of Cubist elements, of the automobile influenced by Constructivism, Cubism, and "Fernandlégerism" makes one look at cars in a whole new light.

The title, Reflections and Shadows, comes from a section in which he discusses how what one sees in reverse in a reflection (in a mirror, in water) or shadow is often better - sharper, more intense - than the original. "If you look only at the reflection, and not at the reflecting part, you see a gratuitous reality that exists for you alone. For fun I throw a stone into the upside-down landscape, and seeing that the lower part moves I almost expect the upper part to move too."

If I quoted all my favorite parts of this book, I'd be typing almost the entire thing, so you'll have to go read it for yourself!

Rating:
Summary: Delightful little book
Review: The autobiographical musings of a New Yorker cartoonist told to his old friend, and filled with wit, humanity and philosophical gems. Stories of escaping from the fascist police in Italy, too lazy to brutally arrest people at the usual invisible ungodly hour. Or civic life in 1950s Washington, and the charming people who knew exactly how to be courteous and to dismiss those who didn't belong. Or the poor white in kentucky, like protagonists out of American fiction, whereas the bourgeoisie, respectable people, "always the same". And Magritte's discovery of multiple sources of light in a painting (sun, streetlamp, electric light inside a house, the moon, reflections of light. Or American gastronomy, in which "the taste of the nation are governed by the tastes of children".