Bleecker and MacDougal Feb. 1523

Saul Steinberg, who was born in Romania and studied in Italy, was an inveterate traveler, but he was the quintessential New Yorker from the moment he arrived in 1942. The Museum of Modern Art included Steinberg in its traveling exhibition Fourteen Americans in 1946, and his work was integral to The New Yorker for half a century. In 1969 he wrote to his friend Aldo Buzzi that the magazine was “My refuge, patria, and safety net.”



In the 1950s and 60s, the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal was the center of Greenwich Village avant-garde culture. The Cafe Figaro, San Remo, and Cafe Borgia were frequented by the likes of Bob Dylan, the Beat poets, Andy Warhol, and Miles Davis. Steinberg depicts a quieter, pre-colonial village corner with characteristic deadpan humor in this unpublished sketch.