Steinberg Galerie Maeght Poster (1953)

Saul Steinberg’s work was exhibited at the Galerie Maeght in Paris for the first time in the spring of 1953. The gallery, which was founded in 1936 in Cannes and opened a Paris location in 1946, was known for representing an impressive international roster of artists, including Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, and Alexander Calder, among others. Steinberg created this poster to promote his show, simply called “Recent drawings by Steinberg.” This title, along with the rest of the poster’s text, appears in the upper half of the page, with Steinberg’s hand-drawn letters offering a spirited contrast to the Roman type of the gallery’s logotype. Amidst the text, a gendarme performs a balancing act fit for a circus, and his uniform offers the only spots of color in an otherwise black-and-white design. The poster’s lower half is filled by a fanciful scene of turreted buildings and train sheds with chaotic lines of tracks that spill out towards the viewer. The structures call to mind the kind of ironwork that is a hallmark of Parisian architecture, appearing everywhere from Metro stops to the Eiffel Tower, and they suggest a view of Paris as seen through Steinberg’s eyes.