Saul Steinberg: the Americans

In 1958, celebrated New Yorker illustrator Saul Steinberg was tasked
to design a mural for the US Pavilion at the Brussels World s Fair.
The resulting vibrant, boisterous and gently satirical collage titled
The Americans depicted the diverse scenery of modern life from the
small town to the big city, from the drugstore counter to the baseball
diamond. The 230-foot, eight-panel collage of brown paper, wallpaper
fragments, newspaper clippings and other ephemera is the premise for
the Museum Ludwig exhibition, seen for the first time since the World s
Fair. Feauturing a full fold out of the mural, this gorgeous exhibition
catalog offers a critical reappraisal of the project, including a biographical
essay from Iain Topliss and an essay from Melissa Renn contextualizing the
mural within the collages of the historical avant-garde and mid-century
pop sensibilities, plus texts by Phillip Kaiser and Inga Rossi-Schrimpf.