Fuga d'artista. L'internamento di Saul Steinberg in Italia attraverso il suo diario e i suoi disegni

Artist’s Escape, Saul Steinberg’s Internment in Italy through his Journal, and his Drawings (by Mario Tedeschini Lalli) - Saul Steinberg, one of the most brilliant and acclaimed artists and illustrators of the 20th century, had an important Italian background. In the Thirties, leaving his native Romania, he studied Architecture in Milan, and earned a living drawing cartoons for humorous periodicals as Bertoldo, and Settebello. The anti-semitic Laws of 1938, made it impossible for him to continue working in Italy, and after his graduation in March 1940 he tried to emigrate. But only in 1941 he managed eventually to land in Santo Domingo, on his way to the US, after many months of life on the run, and a few weeks of internment in a concentration camp on the Adriatic. The article introduces here, for the first time, part of his personal journal relating to those months, and the drawings that illustrated it. These documents clarify a very important moment in his life, that will reflect on his later works. At the same time they are an exemplary, specific instance of the larger, and dramatic situation of alien Jews who happened to be in Italy at the beginning of World War II.

Mario Tedeschini Lalli, Fuga d'artista. L'internamento di Saul Steinberg in Italia attraverso il suo diario e i suoi disegni in "MONDO CONTEMPORANEO" 2/2008, pp 91-136, DOI: