Sale 2526 - Illustration Art, December 10, 2019

Of this drawing, he wrote: “Life is seen here like a voyage from (birth) A to the end, B. Normal lives make simple, even geometric travels, tracks without surprises, lives determined by family, money, geography or even logical and normal disasters. There is another normality—that of the neurotic or insane, shown here only by the more disagreeable drawing. The artist (and my idea of the artist, poet, painter, composer, etc., is the novelist) investigates all the other lives in order to understand the world and possibly himself before returning to his own, often for a short and dull time only. It accounts for the delayed (even retarded) nature of the artist.”—from the Whitney catalogue. The Labyrinth, Steinberg’s famous collection of drawings in which he, in his own words, “discovers and invents” numerous and varied events and objects including baseball, birds, music, motels, women, cats, crocodiles, the cube, museums, and Moscow, was chosen for reprint by The New York Review of Books this year featuring a new introduction by Nicholson Baker, an afterword by Harold Rosenberg, and new notes on the artwork.