Provincetown

Steinberg’s drawing of an artist --- himself? --- working on the beach at Provincetown captures a lighter side of the artist's work. Made in the early 1980s, this (almost literally) breezy beach scene dates from a period when Steinberg had become an iconic figure in the art world, thanks to his decades-long association with The New Yorker magazine. Steinberg drawings were part of the unconsidered mental furniture of the bien pensant in these decades, and they served as markers of a certain New York-centric worldliness. New Yorkers go to the beach in the summer, and so does The New Yorker, which means that so must Saul Steinberg --- though in truth he was more associated with Long Island than the Cape.