From Peter Schjeldahl’s review of a new biography of Saul Steinberg in the December 3, 2012 New Yorker:<\/p>\n
Steinberg’s image<\/em> [“View of the World from Ninth Avenue”] was almost instantaneously everywhere. He couldn’t pass the window of a gift or souvenir shop without seeing it imitated, parodied, or outright cribbed. He was furious, and his lawyer had to restrain him from suing in every instance, be it just a T-shirt or a coffee mug. He did see one case through, winning a big judgment against Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., for a rankly plagiarizing poster used to promote the 1984 movie “Moscow on the Hudson.” The studio’s lawyers blundered by contending that the ad simply represented the same buildings that Steinberg had drawn. But he convinced the court that those buildings, though derived from observation, were largely fashioned by his imagination. Resemblance to reality was one kind of artifice among the many in his art.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From Peter Schjeldahl’s review of a new biography of Saul Steinberg in the December 3, 2012 New Yorker: Steinberg’s image [“View of the World from Ninth Avenue”] was almost instantaneously everywhere. He couldn’t pass the window of a gift or … Continue reading