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Saul Steinberg & Vladimir Nabokov ...gift volumes inscribed by VN
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----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy P. Klein
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/22/arts/design/22BOXE.html
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February 22, 2004
An Assistant Tells All, Finally and Gracefully
By SARAH BOXER
n 1999, at the memorial service for Saul Steinberg, the artist famous for his fanciful depiction of New Yorker's short-sighted view of the world, remarks were made by the novelists Saul Bellow and Norman Manea, the poet John Hollander, the artist Mary Frank, the art historian Leo Steinberg, the writer Ian Frazier and the neurobiologist Dr. Torsten Wiesel. But one man who had known Steinberg for 30 years remained silent.
Anton van Dalen was Steinberg's assistant. He spent almost every Wednesday in the artist's studio on Union Square West and, later, in his apartment on East 75th Street, while Steinberg read, thought, talked and doodled. "He needed people for the little things that were difficult for him to do," Mr. van Dalen said in a recent interview: repairs, wiring and making calls to maintenance people and framers. He also needed help gluing faux rulers, pens and pencil stubs to the trompe l'oeil tabletops he made.
Mr. van Dalen has never made much ado about his connection with Steinberg. One of the things that Steinberg, a notoriously private man who preferred to be photographed with one of his paper-bag masks over his face, valued most in his assistant was the distance he kept. "Steinberg was this bright sun," Mr. van Dalen said. "He could warm you. But if you got too close, he would burn you. I was like his shadow."
Now Mr. van Dalen, an artist, pigeon keeper and life-drawing teacher at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, is a shadow no more. He has mounted a show at the school of the objects that Steinberg gave him and his family over the years: drawings, posters, postcards, collages, clocks, tables and books. Mr. van Dalen inherited 69 boxes of books from Steinberg, including an entire Talmud, books on typography and Freemasonry and volumes inscribed by Vladimir Nabokov, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Le Corbusier, Bellow and MirС. He even has a Picasso book that Steinberg inscribed to himself in French, mimicking Picasso's handwriting and drawing style.
Mr. van Dalen, who spoke about Steinberg while helping to install the exhibition, said he hoped to teach the next generation of artists who this mysterious man was. Many students today know nothing about art history, he said. Steinberg was the opposite, an artist who plundered everything, Chinese art for clouds, Dutch art for sky, Cubism for cars, Futurism for street life: "He used art history as a grammar."
Master and assistant did not come together by accident. In the late 1960's, when Mr. van Dalen moved to New York from the Netherlands, he set out to meet the two men he admired most, the crime photographer Weegee and Steinberg. He met Weegee easily, but Steinberg proved elusive. When Mr. van Dalen telephoned him, Steinberg told him to call back the next year. Mr. van Dalen did. Steinberg told him to call back in two weeks. He did. Steinberg told him to call back in 20 minutes. He did. Then they met. In 1969 Mr. van Dalen became Steinberg's assistant.
Steinberg worked in a studio on Union Square West, with a view looking north toward the Empire State building and the Chrysler building. "It was a huge loft," Mr. van Dalen said. Steinberg was trying to make large works, "but he was lost in that space. He sat at a little table like this," Mr. van Dalen said, pointing to one of Steinberg's tables in the exhibition, a wooden door marked up with tiny pencil doodles that was resting on a pair of sawhorses.
Five floors below Steinberg's studio was Andy Warhol's factory. "They were intrigued by each other," Mr. van Dalen recalled. "Of all the artists in the next generation, Warhol was the one who most resembled Steinberg." He played with his identity, intentionally confused people about his history and was fascinated with popular culture and mass production.
Steinberg was "like a cat" in the studio, Mr. van Dalen said. "He would be thinking and not doing anything. The idea was everything. Labor was abhorrent to him." And yet he worked, Mr. van Dalen said, like a one-man assembly line. He would make a lot of dark Dutch skies, for instance, "sheets and sheets of skies." Then he would "go in and put music paper or figures" on these sheets. He worked in layers. At the end, he used would stamp the drawings like a notary public or a postal worker.
Steinberg often used printers' tools (his father had a printing and box-making business) or referred playfully to them. One drawing in the show, which appears to be done freehand in ink, was in fact the work of multiple rubber stamps designed according to Steinberg's specifications: a square of stipples, a staff of lines, a collection of more zigzaggy lines, a tiny, anonymous looking man. One stamp looks like a visa. Another is the stamp bearing the name of the work itself, "Certified Landscape."
Steinberg drew incessantly, especially when he talked on the phone. "He was obsessed ≈ he could not stop drawing," Mr. van Dalen said. He would fill one sketch book with drawings of police cars, then another with taxicabs, robot-men, alligators, baseball players, shadowy figures. But he did not generally publish his doodles. He mastered one figure at a time and brought them together later. "There are certain characters he would use again and again, like a repertory company," Mr. van Dalen said. "He would bring them onstage, but his stage was paper."
Surprisingly, Steinberg did not always work straight from his imagination. One of the things Mr. van Dalen did for Steinberg was take snapshots: "Steinberg asked me to take pictures of the Empire State building and pictures of taxis. He would draw a diagram of how he wanted to photograph it, at what angle." A drawing of a giant duck sitting on the edge of a highway is based on an actual duck-shaped building, a Long Island store that sold eggs and ducks, which Mr. van Dalen photographed, at Steinberg's request, with Steinberg posing next to it. (Both drawing and photograph are in the exhibition.)
Steinberg had "a gregarious curiosity, a totally uncensored curiosity about everything," Mr. van Dalen said. He loved to ramble and talk. Steinberg took Mr. van Dalen with him to many places, from Willem de Kooning's studio to the Hasidic Jewish section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. "Walking down the street with him," Mr. van Dalen said, "was like having a pair of binoculars tied to your face."
One of Steinberg's New Yorker covers (there are 71 in the show, dating from 1945 to 1998) shows the blocks around 75th Street between Lexington and Park Avenues as yellow squares. Blue arrows indicate a pathway that begins and ends with a big red X. It is like a treasure map showing the artist's apartment and his customary walk around it. "Here I am trying to not tell anybody anything," Mr. van Dalen said. "and here he is blurting it out to the world."
Apparently Steinberg didn't find it too painful to part with the many original drawings he gave Mr. van Dalen and his family. "He was more interested in the prints than in the originals," Mr. van Dalen said. "When he got proofs of The New Yorker, he would hold it like it was on a silver tray." The originals would be stuffed in drawers, "all banged up" or folded, until they were given away to friends. It was understood that there would be "no histrionics" about the gifts, Mr. van Dalen said. Steinberg told him: "I don't want to see any emotional display. Just take it."
The New York Times
The Saul Steinberg Foundation/ARS, N.Y.
"Long Island Duck, on Highway, 1979"
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