A set of linked doodles

The niceties of Saul Steinberg’s cartoon drawings are doodle-related. Figures begin at the nose, become elaborately hatted and shod and strut like clockwork toys; words are transformed into free-standing objects; horizontal lines denote runways or table edges. Often, it seems, the draughtsman’s pen went on automatic, pen-pushing the same old absurdities, perplexities and double-takes on increasingly expensive paper. Steinberg liked to think that his drawings possessed ‘poetic strangeness’. Indeed they do, often enough, partly because he never quite erased from his work the sense of his being a stranger in foreign parts. Born in 1914, in Ramnicul-Sarat, Romania, he grew up against the background of his father’s fancy cardboard-box factory. He spent most of the Thirties in Milan, where de Chirico shadows and Fascist salutes entered his repertoire. In the nick of time he reached America, joined the navy and drew on his experiences in postings in Italy, China and India for All in Line, published in 1945.