William Steig and the Purity of the Blues
By Andy Friedman

William Steig-an artist whose drawings and cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker magazine since 1930, and, since 1968 has published over two dozen celebrated children's books-finds mystic truths in simple things. He is an honest artist who likes nice people and good weather. Even on a grey day in a city made of grey buildings and streets, inhabited by people with grey faces and clothes, he will find excitement in monochromatic harmony. In many ways, his art can be thought of as a product of the blues. There is a visual terseness to his drawings that recalls the simple, direct artistry of dusty country-blues singers like Blind Willie Johnson, Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell, and Robert Johnson. Steig, who is four years older than Robert Johnson, sold his first cartoon to The New Yorker six years before Johnson, as the legend goes, sold his soul to the devil at "The Crossroads." These blues musicians explored their intense emotions, like Steig, with the least cumbersome, technical means. And, like these street-singers, who tried to make a living off their songs during the Depression, Steig turned to his drawing skills to support his family after his father lost his job. In Steig's drawings, pen and ink is the lonesome guitar that turns his love for drawing into soul-inspiring music.

When he sits down to draw, which he does daily, William Steig doesn't know what is going to happen. He always starts with the face. In one drawing, done this past summer, a dejected bald man looks lost in contemplation over a pair of empty shot glasses. He rests his beefy, sorry arms on the bar by a pile of loose change. The expression on his heavy head is the music that goes with the words scrawled in his unmistakable handwriting. It reads, "What did she mean when she said she hates me?" A drawing like this is a far cry from the stylized gag cartoons that put a lid on his innate creative freedom in the 30's and 40's. When you look back at Steig's "Small Fry" cartoons, which featured a city-boy living in a tightly-rendered, black-and-white-washed world of one-liners and fantasies of fighter planes and parachutes, you can see how much Steig's work has evolved. His son, Jeremy, a jazz flutist, encouraged his dad to get rid of the pencil and go straight into a clean sheet of paper with an ink pen. The sacrifice made Steig's drawings more direct, so you could see whatever he was feeling at the moment the pen or brush skated over the page. As a result, his powers for observation and humorous commentary took a visceral turn.

When he lived near Washington Square Park in New York City, Steig liked to spend a day or a night walking and looking, knowing that the would find a way back to him when he sat down to draw. In another work, Steig presents a foppish, bohemian dandy approaching a large woman in a kitchen dress. Her fists are clenched and she glares at him with a look of staunch disapproval. The erect, confident stride of the man turns rubbery, his left leg bending like spaghetti in a pot of hot water. The man asks,"You question my integrity?" The scene, most likely, was picked up on one of those walks in the busy city, long ago. The intimacy of experience has the same honesty heard in Blind Willie McTell's "Nobody's Fault But Mine." In it, the old-time Atlanta blues singer, whose words and vocal inflections are some of the most trustworthy in the genre's history, sings, "Had to eat my porkchops/Without any salt," and you know he did. Dave Van Ronk, a legendary folk and blues performer and, incidentally, a native of Washington Square, appreciates this inventiveness in Steig's art. "All artists like to play," says Van Ronk, "regardless of the content and regardless of the intent-it's play."

If the blues can be considered an artform that transcends traditional musical convention, then we can think of William Steig to be, perhaps, the Robert Johnson of visual art. Steig's drawings are raw depictions of his own emotions expressed in a simple, easy style. "I'm a doodler," Steig says. When he feels like drawing, he just picks up a pen and begins. This method makes it quite easy for him to get right into it-an essential blues prerequisite-and a far cry from the elaborate setups in his "Small Fry" cartoons. His wife of 33 years, Jeanne, a prolific sculptor, recalls how her artist husband climbs out of bed at night to get a drink of water and ends up at the drawing table. Or, after getting up from the couch in the living room to look for his eyeglasses, will go missing for hours on end-only to be discovered in his studio with his drawings. He has a passion for locating and living in the beauty of the world and he indulges it any time it comes to him.

His drawings are easy to understand because they are about events and feelings that most of us experienced. He works in pen and black ink, a paintbrush, and a few tubes of watercolor paint on white or cream-colored paper-the equipment most of used in kindergarten. This makes his drawings fun to appreciate, like the song of a good street-singer, because there is no pretension or insecurity in the delivery. His language is simple, too. In another recent ink drawing, an old man stands in front of a tree. His wrinkles reflect the strength and character of the lines in it's sturdy trunk . A caveman, in another drawing, casually, and repeatedly, stabs a calm lion sitting by a palm tree with a series of spears stuck in his ribs. Steig could be making a poke at the violent side of human nature, or, more likely, going deeper into a more personal exploration where, as he says, "one thing could mean another." Maybe the lion is his own source of personal conflict, and Steig, the caveman with the ink pen, tells us of the way he goes about chipping away at a persistent dead-weight.

At 93 years-old, William Steig is at the peak of his development. His lines have grown more liberated and revealing, his colors more bold and joyful, and his subjects emit a youthful zest for life. "He's the wise man at the top of the mountain," says Michael Maslin, a New Yorker cartoonist. It's clear that Steig has found celebration for life in his art. He has been called a cartoonist, a children's book author, and an illustrator, but these successes should not be the cause for our celebration of the man. "People depend on pigeon-holes and can't really look at the thing itself," says Van Ronk. "The man is an artist."

William Steig's brave re-inventions of himself through his artwork, and his revered, poetic insight throughout a career that has reached its eighth decade, has established himself as an important figure in the developement of American painting. He has fashioned a directness, the way Robert Johnson did in his blues, that requires fearlessness. It is the most difficult trick to pull off. "I can feel him," says Taj Mahal, another contemporary blues musician, "and I don't know that his work needs to be considered blues. It needs to be considered art made by a human being who has hit the point where it works for everybody."