bleecker street

Saul Steinberg's drawing for the January 16, 1971 issue of the New Yorker, a study of a New York street scene, and a portrait of  a society in meltdown, is master work from the humble cartoonist who turned out to be possibly the 20th century's greatest artist.

It's a two-dimensional work with a visible soundtrack; we can "see" and almost hear the combined cacophony of the Latino radio station blasting from the transistors of the Puerto Rican radiohead at lower left, blending harshly with the sound of the police siren, a mix typical of the streets of NYC and San Francisco at the time.

Dirts and drunks and addicts, who appear as smudges on the landscape, rub elbows here with the middle-class and poverty-stricken, the passive and the violent, in a grotesque dance of social anarchy.

Steinberg died in 1999, but the unwinding of our society from the core outward is a work in progress.

Yesterday I reveived that back issue of the magazine from an 
Ebay seller, and it's already framed, matted, and on the wall.