The Line / Children’s Labyrinth | Saul Steinberg, 1954
The hallmark of Saul Steinberg’s art is the inked line, always drawn with a spare elegance that expresses the semiotic richness of the line itself. As it shifts meaning from one passage to the next, Steinberg’s line comments on its own transformative nature.
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The Line, the original a 10-meter-long drawing with 29 panels that unfold, accordion fashion, is Steinberg’s manifesto about the conceptual possibilities of the line and the artist who gives them life. His drawing hand begins and ends the sequence, as the simple horizontal line that hand creates metamorphoses into, among other things, a water line, laundry line, railroad track, sidewalk, arithmetic division line, or table edge; near the end, the curlicues etched by the iceskater’s blade remind us of the role calligraphy plays in Steinberg’s art.
Saul Steinberg, The Line, 1954. Ink on paper, 18 x 404, The Saul Steinberg Foundation, New York
The Line was designed for the Children’s Labyrinth, a spiraling, trefoil wall structure at 10th Triennial of Milan, a design and architecture fair that opened in August 1954. The drawing, photographically enlarged and incised into the wall, was one of four Steinberg conceptions used on the labyrinth.(.)
The Children’s Labyrinth, a spiraling, trefoil wall structure at 10th Triennial of Milan, 1954
The Children’s Labyrinth, Milan, 1954
Saul Steinberg, The Line, 1954
The Children’s Labyrinth, Milan, 1954
Saul Steinberg, The Line, 1954
Also:
Labyrinthe
La volonté attend sans cesse
Un désir sans trouver.
Le cran d’arrêt passionne l’absence
de gaudriole.
Une cicatrice vers la nuit
profane la réflexion
II n’y a que détachement
incrédule.
On me fait souffrir
parce que je sais l’indifférence
Banalités embarquées sans cesse
sur elles-mêmes.
Les horizons attirent les yeux
de nos sentiments.
Francis Picabia
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Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.
Francis Picabia
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