Late in his career, the artist Saul Steinberg said, “It is one of the most important functions of art and literature and poetry: Give them a riddle. Give them a headache!” Hopefully avoiding the headache, Give Them a Riddle traces Steinberg’s inventive artistic practice over five decades. Featuring nearly all of the 75 works recently gifted to the Benton by The Saul Steinberg Foundation, the exhibition spans his early-career commercial works and ink drawings to a later series of sculptures of the artist’s workspace and drawings on unconventional surfaces such as metal plates.
Though best known for his association with The New Yorker, Steinberg is also recognized as a leading twentieth-century artist, philosopher, and cultural critic whose prolific creativity took form across vastly different media and themes. Give Them a Riddle explores the intersections of Steinberg’s art and biography, shaped as they both were by his truly global peripatetic existence and constant creative experimentation. Viewers can witness in the exhibition the development of Steinberg’s distinctive, playful graphic language and how he used it to document, satirize, and critique the cultural habits and conditions of the post–World War II era.
Organized by Victoria Sancho Lobis, Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the Benton and associate professor of art history, and curatorial intern Arivumani Srivastava ’26
This exhibition has been supported by the Judith A. Cion ’65 Fund in Endowment for Student-Curated Exhibitions.
