#sam steinberg

Sam Steinberg in boxing pose 1974 /"Tete de Personnage avec Serpent 20x15" Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland

Outsider artist and Oblivion cover painter Sam Steinberg never earned any art world cred for his distinct vision. Maybe it was his prolific output (my conservative estimate is 3000+ works over 15 years, but it could be closer to 10,000. He probably made anywhere between 5 and 15 paintings every week) or the fact that he sold exclusively on the Columbia University campus in New York. Or perhaps it was that the influential New York art critics need the outsiders to actually be outside the city? Whatever it was, Sam got virtually no media attention during his lifetime (1896-1982). The most in depth piece on Sam was written in 1996 in Folk Art magazine. I’ve reposted it here because the original is in a difficult to read online edition of the magazine (where you can see all references and credits). 

You can read more about Sam’s Oblivion contributions here.

Sam Steinberg: A House of Cardboard or a Marble Palace?

By Craig Bunch FOLK ART Summer 1996

Ninety-four-year-old Pauline Steinberg summed up life with her brother Sam in a breathless conjunction: “I was a mother to him. I was a father to him, and I tried to be a sister to him. And I know his weak points and his good points and I know how ambitious he was and how good and kind he was. He was truly a wonderful man, my brother. The pictures don’t show it, you know.” Some considered the persistent street vendor a figure for mockery or even a nuisance, but few who could see beyond his humble calling would disagree with Pauline Steinberg’s assessment of her brother’s virtues. More than a few have though that the paintings also say something wonderful about Sam Steinberg.

“The little picture is very interesting, it gives me keen pleasure,” wrote Jean Dubuffet in 1973 of one of Steinberg’s paintings. “I would like to acquire, if it is possible, some other pictures by him.” Even a fictional Steinberg painting was sufficient to overcome the protagonist of a Rebecca Goldstein novel “with a nostalgia that surged into desire.”

“He was a very picturesque figure on campus,” remembers Professor Robert Austerlitz. “He was straight from the heart.” Upon the artist’s death in 1992, Columbia University president Michael Sovern consoled Pauline Steinberg, Sam’s companion of eighty years, saying that her brother was “an institution” and would be “greatly missed.” “An institution gone,” echoed Columbia College dean Arnold Collery of this little man who was for decades a strong presence in the Columbia community, as imposing in his own way as the dome of Low Library or the great limestone tower nearby Riverside Church. As Sam Steinberg himself once put it, “Everybody here know me from my paintings and everybody likes me here.”

A typical Steinberg work is a whimsical and surreal as a Klee or Miró, as sincere as a Grandma Moses, as enamored of the body colored plane as a Stella and of the almond eye as the Egyptian tomb paintings – and as original as they come. (Who but Steinberg could pull off a portrait with “one Chinese eye and one Japanese eye”?) Like each of the above artists in some ways, Steinberg nevertheless produced an oeuvre that could not be mistaken for that of any other. “Sam,” as he was universally known, touched the lives of thousands, from university presidents to generations of Columbia students. Yet he and his work are virtually unknown to anyone who did not once frequent the few blocks of Morningside Heights  that converge on Columbia University’s College Walk. The data on Sam Steinberg exists almost entirely in the realm of memory and anecdote, and in a variety of difficult-to-access Columbia publications. This article, then is an attempt to synthesize and preserve the basic facts on an American original.

“Hey mistake, I got paintings here! Or maybe you want a Hoishey bar.” He must have warbled some variation of this theme a million times in his unmistakable crackly Brooklynese. Like Grandma Moses before him, Steinberg came to painting at an advanced age. Until the last of his eighty-five years, however, he remained a simple street vendor, typically rising with the sun and returning by subway at the end of a workday to one of a succession of nondescript Bronx apartments long after dark. Whether hawking ice cream from a cart or candy bars from a low-slung cardboard box. Steinberg never earned more than enough to provide the necessities for himself and sister Pauline. He enjoyed a small but livable income, fresh air, no boss, steady customers, and, in his own restricted universe, a measure of fame.

Back in the World of Tomorrow days of 1939, when he still signed his name “Chuck,” Charles Saxon, best known for his long tenure as a New Yorker cartoonist, rendered for the Columbia humor magazine Jester a pen-and-ink caricature of a man with his feet firmly planted in the present. In almost every respect, this sketch closely resembles the Sam of forty years later: candy bar in the right hand, left hand raised in the air to signal a potential customer, cardboard box beside him, the bright eyes and summoning upturned mouth, the prominent nose and ears, the baggy pants and work oxfords, the ever-present coat and oversized taxi driver’s cap. Appearing more gaunt and less robust forty years later, as health waned and age waxed, Steinberg was nevertheless the unmistakable    subject of Saxon’s drawing. Shortly after Steinberg’s death, Robert Diamond, a Columbia senior, remarked that he “saw a yearbook picture from 30 years ago with a picture of Sam in it and he looked the same. What else here stays the same for 30 years?” 

Portrait of William Glaser by Sam Steinberg 1981 (right) Sam with William Glaser 1981

In certain photographs from the 1960s and 1970s, Steinberg affects the pose of a boxer challenging his opponent. Perhaps he was paying homage to Jack Dempsey or Rocky Marciano or living his own youthful dreams; perhaps it was a photographer’s staged pose. Jack Vartoogian, one whose camera capture Sam in this stance, remembers it as Sam’s idea. Pauline Steinberg discounts any thoughts of hero-worship: “You know, Sam didn’t admire anybody special. He was a good, plain, ordinary person. He didn’t have to admire anybody.” Sam painted the famous and infamous, she says, “because God puts in us the power to do beautiful things.” 

Undeniably, Steinberg painted famous people, icons of history and popular culture among them: Washington and Lincoln, Garland and Valentino, Elvis Presley and Jesus Christ. As photographic likenesses are not the forte of the surrealist or the primitive, identification of the subject required a program. Like a caricaturist who emphasizes one or two striking features of his or her subject, Steinberg would tender Telly Salvalas’s Kojak, for instance, by accentuating the large nose and shiny dome. Valentino could be recognized by the multicolored sheik’s garb and the snake protruding from –or from behind– his head. As for his version of Richard Nixon, the artist could only aloud at his own ingenuity: “Ya think they’ll throw him in jail?”

By some accounts, the most popular works of Steinberg’s 1978 one-man exhibition at Columbia’s Ferris Booth Hall –his first show there in ten years– were the portrait of then-Columbia president William McGill and “Self-Portrait on the Moon.” The well-attended show included more than 50 paintings, of which nine belonged to the Professor of German Joseph Bauke, who was reported at the time to own forty-eight “Sams” –certainly one of the largest collections.

The profit motive and a desire to please his customers often led Steinberg to execute special commissions. There were limits, however. According to Henry Rosenberg, sometime around 1972 “sam was taking commissions for portraits: students would describe their own hair- and eye-color. When he realized that I wanted him to do a portrait of himself, Sam looked horrified. ‘I don’t do that,’ he said.” The 1978 exhibition of Self Portrait on the Moon suggests that Steinberg had decided, or been persuaded, to abandon that policy. Or perhaps he simply misunderstood Rosenberg’s request. In 1992 Char Smullyan’s office in Columbia’s Hamilton Hall still displayed one of the portraits she painted from a photograph of Steinberg. “Oh, would you paint me?” she remembers him saying. The painting shows a smiling, seated Sam holding a candy bar; on the ground sits his rendering of a dog with birdlike heads attached to or perhaps emerging from the ears.

Columbia graduate Peter Frank, an art critic and curator, wrote that Steinberg often produced a work to order, only to find later that “the order was a joke or an aside that Sam took seriously.” Eventually Steinberg would sell it to another customer: “The party din’t collect his paintin’. D’ya think I should see it ta someone else? Ya like it?”

Despite the stylized portraits and regular commissions, Steinberg was best known for the animals he painted. Mermaids, snakes, dogs, birds, and especially cats inhabited his menagerie. A mermaid may have even been his muse. After deciding that he was becoming too old for the life of the peddler and wondering what to do, he one day “saw a statue, a mermaid, half-woman, half-fish, and at the age of 67, was inspired to begin a new career as a painter. Much of Sam’s work,” surmised Lenny Glynn in 1968, “can best be understood as variations on the motif of this epiphany, the half-woman, half-fish.” Indeed, a great many of his animals are hybrids unknown to veterinary science, comprising a zoom of nameless creatures that can be appreciated only by contemplating their portraits: banana dogs, bird women, lizard ladies, and what can only be described as grandmother cats. “God gave me the power,” Steinberg once said. “I never was a painter before.”

“My mother was born in Russia,” Pauline Steinberg explains, “you know, where that big blast was – in Kiev.” Her father, Adoph (later Aaron), was from Odessa. As for her siblings: “First came my brother Lou – Louie. After him came Sam. Then I was the first oldest daughter. Then came my brother Morris. And then came my beautiful sister Doris. That’s five… Well, each one of [them] were beautiful natures – because my mother and father were two beautiful people –you know what I mean?– family… But there was something lacking, you know. Lacking of love and affection of both parents for the children. You know, two people, when they get together, they first have to straighten out their own lives – you know what I mean? They have to understand their own nature… When they don’t, they don’t know how to put the family together properly. Right?”

Sam, 1973; photograph by David Weintraub

Sam was born on East Ninety-sixth Street in Manhattan on May 20, 1896, and grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. It was a struggle to survive, Pauline recalls: “We were very, very poor…” The first home she knew was “very shabby. A walkup in a wooden house – all going one way. You wouldn’t know about such apartments. There was a toilet in the yard. [There] was nothing there. Oh, there was no heat.”

“At a very early age,” wrote Lenny Glynn in 1968, “Sam began to work as a grocery boy for $12 a month. In his teens he switched to his lifelong career of peddling ice cream and candy. he was a sickly kids, 4-F in World War One, and has been through more than twenty serious operations in his life for ailments ranging from varicose veins to ingrown eyelashes.” According to Sam, he was once the beneficiary of a two-hundred dollar operation at St. Luke’s Hospital for “half-price, for forty dollars.”

He couldn’t write or read. He [could] write his name a little. He couldn’t read. [Imagine] having a brother who couldn’t read of write.” Pauline explains: “He never went to school much. They couldn’t hold him in school.”

Steinberg undoubtedly saw the subjects of some of his future portraits at the movies or in the pages of such magazines as Life and Look. Perhaps he even encountered Picasso there; he knew of Picasso. “Pictures, yeah,” recalls Pauline. “The only thing he did was magazines. He’d draw pictures on the paper. He didn’t have no paper, so he drew pictures right on the print.”

He sold those pictures, too, says Pauline. “That’s why I had to buy the good stuff. And my older brother said, ‘Don’t waste your money for that.’ And I used every penny to help my brother out, to do the best, to have the best, of everything.” This memory led Pauline to contemplate Sam’s life at Columbia: “And he didn’t like the toilets there. He saw the boys there weren’t clean. They messed up everything. He was even afraid to sit on the toilets there.” That was the least of his difficulties.

Steinberg’s one big trip, taken sometime in the mid-1950s, wrote Lynn Glynn, “made a powerful impression on him… Sam and a friend set out for Texas hopping freights, looking for new jobs. But they were robbed by hobos and Sam was beaten half to death. Frightened for his life, he climbed out on the ladder between the moving cars, screaming for help. It was a terrible experience for him.”

Steinberg himself tells the story best: “I was alone on the car screaming ‘help! help! momma! and stars were falling out of my eyes and I saw devils all around me but it was all country roads, country roads and nobody heard me.” Only the railroad detectives hears him, and they arranged two weeks in the Albany jail for him. Apparently, he made it back to New York City with the aid fo a friend called “Faffalla.” After that, he was cured of the desire to roam. 

(L-R) Untitled (Mermaid with Cat & Dog; Sam by Charles Saxon, 1939 in the Columbia Jester; Sam with a student, circa 1975

Steinberg worked in a variety of media, from t-shirts and bookmarks to large seedpods. But his best work was reserved for cardboard or illustration board. Sometime in mid-1968, about five years after beginning to sell his paintings, he switched from watercolors –“because they hurt his eyes– to Magic Marker on cardboard; at about the same time, he began adding scalloped borders to his works. The often high-quality materials –“permanent markers,” stressed Pauline, and frequently Pearl No.1700 illustration board– were unusual as the media of art brut or outside art, whose practitioners typically appropriate whatever materials ar readily at hand. “Art brut,” a term coined by Jean Dubuffet, and translated as “raw art,” is a style associated with children, psychotics, and other naives whose “untutored, uncensored vision” so pleased the celebrated French artist. And Steinberg’s stories were not alway apocryphal: Dubuffet did enthusiastically accept a Steinberg drawing for the collection of art brut he donated to the city of Lausanne, Switzerland.

Sam’s painting is “certainly not the work of someone who’s insane, but the work of someone who’s simple,” explains Peter Frank, who adds that although “much art brut fills the picture plane,” Sam’s generally did not; he “wanted to create a volume of work that he could sell. If he left areas open, he could get more done. Also he liked bright colors.”

Frank explains the popularity of Sam’s paintings as due to both their visual and thematic appeal: the “fanciful subject matter” and the “psychoanalytic subtext” afforded the sophisticated viewer (in plentiful supply at Columbia) had seemingly found their perfect niche. “When i was on campus, the unsophisticated was celebrated and here was the genuine article… And there was a druggie element. The sinewy lines and intense saturated colors were a trip even for those of us not doing acid.”

Columbia has at times been a hotbed of student political activity, and Steinberg no doubt saw outdoor political gatherings as an opportunity to increase his sales. An Ari Mintz yearbook photograph, captioned “Sam Steinberg works a demo,” features a mugging Sam folding a dollar bill while Che Guevara look-alike in the immediate background does his part to save the world. In another photo, it is not clear who is the sales winner – Sam, holding an A&P bag and makeshift candy box, or his equally well-armed interlocutor, holding a “Students Must Organize” leaflet. Steinberg could even be found hawking his wares at Columbia commencement exercises.

Not all of Steinberg’s admirers remember him from Columbia – or even knew that he was an artist. Carolyn Jones, who bought candy from him as a child in Harlem, required but a single grainy photograph to unlock a forgotten cache of memories: “He used to sell candy for many, many thousands of years,” she could not help but hyperbolize. “He was always walking with his candy. He had a pleasant smile. He had a jolly step about him… a little peppy walk.” She knew him only as the Candy Man.”

“The Candy –that’s what they called him– the Candy Man,” agrees Pauline. “And you know what? On Fifth Avenue in the Bronx was 110th Street… Your weren’t allowed to stand and sell candy there, stayed there. And I was wondering how he got the guts to do [that]. I guess God gave him – let him have his way, you know… Do you know they were jealous of him. They were jealous of his ambition to peddle his candy, to push the ice cream wagon, of his ambition to work to earn a few pennies… And even though I was poor and I had nothing myself and he also [had] nothing. I was thankful I had my brother – and we were both poor you know. We were both emotionally immature.”

He never hated anybody. He wouldn’t hurt anybody. He was so good that, that at first he peddled outside of Columbia College –you know what I mean– and it was after the war, the first war. The soldiers came home and they wanted to take his place…”

After the First World War?”

“Yeh, but God put him in a better place. God let him go into Columbia College…”

“You mean he had to stay outside at first; he couldn’t–“

“At first they didn’t know him.”

“They didn’t know him; they didn’t want people selling things inside?”

“Right. But he was the only one.”

“Finally they let him in?”

“Yeah.”

“When? Do you know about when they let him in?”

“I don’t know. That was the time when I think Eisenhower was something inside in Columbia. Wasn’t he president?”

“That’s right.” (Eisenhower was president of Columbia University during 1949-1950.)

“Oh, oh, oh, oh oh! You know St. John the Divine Church… Well, uh, first of all, in St. John the Divine Church they had an outreach for senior citizens –you know what I mean– so he told them the landlord didn’t do anything for us where we lived, you know what I mean. So they tried to get him in there to the building… After he died they got me a place to live.” Pauline continues: “You know, I was alone and my brother once closed the door on me and he wouldn’t let me come back in the house. That was a time when I was all alone in the world. I was like an outcast. My own brother.”

“Sam? Why did that happen?”

“Because I didn’t have the courage of my own convictions. You know because he [knew] I was weak, I wasn’t my own true self… I was like burned out, washed out… And he wanted me –even my pastor– he wanted me to stand up for myself. He locked me out.”

“When? When did that happen?”

“It happened. How he ever let me in I don’t know, but I got in,” Pauline says with a short laugh. “Well, I got back in again and uh, I tried to do the best I could. I went to the arts downtown where they sell artwork –and I bought the best pencils and pens and papers and I bought a art table and I spent a lot of money –where I got the money I don’t know– and I bought him the best of everything so he could draw, because he had a yen for drawing. You see, whatever he drew – that’s his!”

Steinberg was a favorite subject of passing photographers and student filmmakers. Edward Gray made a short film around 1971 with now-obsolete equipment. In a surrealist homage to a surrealist painter, Sam is featured singing through the mouths of hi Magic Marker creations. Pauline notes that Sam “made singing tapes. He sang like Caruso, you know what I mean.”

“Did he have a good voice?”

“Beautiful! Beautiful voice. He had a beautiful voice. He made tapes about our landlord, what mean landlord he is, how he doesn’t do anything for the tenants.”

Michael Schulder and Tim Burnett produced a video documentary during their junior year at Columbia (1976-1977). Schulder recounts: We approached Sam with our idea, to which he was receptive, without being terribly enthusiastic or even interested… Our coup de grace was traveling with Sam by subway to his apartment in the South Bronx… I laugh at the thought of us lugging all that heavy video equipment by ourselves to the Grand Concourse. Sam lived with his sister, who was a few years younger than him. She was much more in the ‘real’ world than him… The best line, in the body of the show and under the closing credits, was Sam saying in his hoarse voice, ‘I don’t drink; I don’t smoke; I work hard – ‘cause that’s the kind of guy I am.’”

Painting and album cover; “Friends” by Marc Cohen (Copeland) & John Abercrombie 1973, Oblivion Records

A colorful 1973 jazz record bears Sam’s signature. Entitled Friends, in his own shaky script but perhaps another’s spelling, this cover image depicts three cats in casual shirts and short. Five years later, Sam Steinberg was still selling fifteen-by-twenty-inch paintings for five dollars each. His paintings tended to grow smaller as he grew older. Pauline says that “he went as far as charging ten dollars a picture –ten dollars a picture.” Schulder believes that prices in the late 1970s “would vary from $5 to $15, depending on size and subject. Without a doubt, as Peter Frank noted in 1975, “If the Museum of Modern Art discovers Sam Steinberg, those paintings ain’t gonna go for $3.50 a shot!”

Sam and Pauline were collaborators in art as well as life. As for his painting, “I tried to make it a little neater, you know what I mean. More evenly. You know, it should be nice,” she says hesitantly. “He knew about colors, but uh, I gave him nice colors.” The controlled use of vivid colors is one of the remarkable aspects of the paintings signed “Sam S.” “I loved every picture he ever made, every picture he ever did,” says Pauline, knowing, perhaps, that there is some of her in each one of them. But Sam, she says, did not particularly care for them: “He didn’t want any of his pictures at all.”

“You know,” she considers, “he never counted his money. He just made and made, and put it away, didn’t wanna count it. As though, as though it was for a reason. Maybe so I should have [enough] to live on. Think so?… But you know what Sam told me some day? He said, ‘Pauline, would you like to live in a marble palace?’ He asked me if I want to live in a marble palace. He said, ‘Do you want a chauffeur to take you home?’ Why did he want all that good for me? He loved his sister. But I gave away my whole heart…”

Untitled (Crystal Ball) circa 1976; George Washington 1973

The reader may have gained the impression that Sam is remembered –indeed cherished– more for his unique personality and Brooklyn accent, his being in the right place at the right time, and his sheer staying power than for the quality of his art. Undeniably, nonaesthetic factors have always affected the reputation of an artist. Despite the force of Sam’s personality, his art stands on its own and might one day take its place in the pantheon of American outsider artists.

The bright colors have here and there begun to fade. But Sam is remembered as a graying Columbian flips through the pages of an old yearbook, as a resident of Lausanne notices the curious small painting in the Collection l’Art Brut, as a painted seeped emerges from the confines of a desk drawer, or as a sister imagines what might have been.

Sam Steinberg from fredseibert on Vimeo.

In 1973, outsider artist Sam Steinberg, a fixture on the Columbia University campus in New York City who made thousands of paintings in about 15 years, painted the cover of Oblivion's third release, Friends by alto saxophonist, former Columbia student Marc Cohen (Copland). (Read more about the cover here.)

Sam never got his due from the art establishment who somehow missed his "outsider" work entirely. Was it because he exclusively sold on Columbia's campus? Or that he worked in the mundanity of the common Magic Marker? Or maybe that he worked in New York City, the media capital of the world? Shouldn't 'outsider art' be outside of the world center of "real art?" (Thank you DD.) One way or the other this man who created more than 3000 works (that's conservative; it could be more than 7000 or 10,000, easily!) in only 15 years flew completely under the radar. A shame.

In 1983, my Columbia radio buddy Alan Goodman was my creative partner at MTV. As our last hurrah before starting the world's first media branding company, we asked one of our key animation collaborators, Candy Kugel from Buzzco Associates (founded by Buzz Potamkin), to adapt some of Sam's iconic characters into a couple of 10-second network identifications.

Alan and I loved them, but alas, our successors at MTV did not. The animations never aired. Sigh.

Sam 2014 from Ed Gray on Vimeo.

In 2014, documentarian Ed Gray, a former Columbia student himself, completed a short film on Sam he had shot in 1971.

Part (4 of 4) Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

From the back liner:

About the cover artist:

By Peter Frank

Part 1 (of 4) [Part 2, Part 3, Part 4] The original Sam Steinberg painting for Friends 

"Hey mistah, I got paintings here! Or maybe you want a Hoishey bar." Anyone who was on the Columbia University campus between 1967 and 1982 would hear Sam Steinberg touting his wares every weekday (thanks to Flo Grant for quoting Craig Bunch's Folk Art article). Sam was a street peddler turned "outsider", urban artist, and he was adopted by generations of Columbia students who bought up to 20 paintings each week from this man with a genuine vision. And, he only "exhibited" (aka "sold") his work exclusively on the Columbia campus.

Part 3 (of 4) [Part 1, Part 2, Part 4]

  As far as I know, Friends was the only use of Sam Steinberg's paintings in a commercial marketplace. I suppose that was reflective of the way many non-Columbia students reacted to the art.

Almost everyone hated the cover. 

Marc, our non-Columbia friends, critics, everyone. No one thought it was appropriate for such a serious album. Distributors said we'd never sell albums with covers like this one, and, in the end, they were kind of right. Even though it was reviewed as the "electronic jazz record of the year" (no one called it "fusion" yet, thank goodness), there was a sense that putting a "cartoon" on the cover didn't do the music justice. Tom and I felt we were being as pioneering in the cover design as the music deserved. Art critic Peter Frank called Sam part of Jean Dubuffet's art brut movement (it's called "outsider art" today) and we agreed, it was groundbreaking.

Polaroid Big Shot photograph by Fred Seibert

Part 2 (of 3)  [Part 1, Part 3, Part 4]

Sam Steinberg at Ferris Booth Hall, photography by Fred Seibert,1973 (From the back cover of Friends)

Once we'd worked out payment I tried to explain to Sam Steinberg what an album cover is and that I needed a square painting from him, rather than his customary rectangles; he understood when I drew a pencil square on his illustration board.

When he came back with the painting (including his distinctive signature "Sam S.) in a few days it was with Sam's typical joy and generosity. "I didn't want to waste the space so I made an extra cat!" And sure enough, he'd painted (actually he sketched in pencil, and his sister Pauline did the coloring with Magic Markers) a circular "album" in orange on a square, solid, black field. Then, tucked in on the left was a yellow regtangle with one of his signature "catz," his favorite subject.

Sam's original painting.

We loved the whole thing. Not just the "album" portion, but the yellow & purple cat too. Could we save everything? I spent an awful lot of time on the phone with the printer at the pressing plant in Phoenix trying to suss out whether he could rearrange the elements so we could use all three catz, 20 years before Photoshop, when everything had to be done by hand with cameras and negative film.

At the last minute Marc decided the record shouldn't be the first "Marc Cohen [Copland]" album; everyone had contributed too much. He came up the distressingly banal "Friends," and arguments to the contrary, that was it. Sam didn't really write or read so I tried my best to simulate his signature from the lower left corner of his paintings. We asked Columbia grad, art critic, and future museum curator Peter Frank to write Sam's blurb* for the back cover, and I then did my typically bad job on writing and laying out the back liner (as The Oblivionettes) and the cover was finished.