Untitled (American Citizenship Certificate for Alexander Schneider) - ORIGINAL DRAWING

Used; Like New/Used; Like New. Original artwork certificate for the great violinist written in intentionally unintelligible script and dated 'Febr. 2 1947', the only decipherable other text being the name "Alexander Schneider" and the artist's signature "Steinberg." Ink, colored pencil, watercolor and postage stamp on paper. 10 x 13 inches (25.4 x 32.7 cm.). From the collection of the eminent Lithuanian-American violinist and conductor Alexander Schneider, best known as second violinist of the Budapest String Quartet from 1932 to 1944 and from 1955 to 1967.
An extraordinary example of the artist's celebrated abstract handwriting style. "In the mid-1940s, he had begun to evolve an elegant, but purposely unreadable, calligraphy with which he manufactured false documents—fake certificates, diplomas, passports, and licenses—whose illegibility deprives officialdom of its self-proclaimed authority . By the 1950s, the "handwriting" had matured into such eye-fooling illusiveness that viewers labored to decipher it (they still do). Some of these documents he gave to friends, others he exhibited in gallery shows. But with their added stamps, seals, and pseudo-photographs, they also echo Steinberg's fraught effort to acquire the visas and permissions that enabled him to escape Fascist Italy and, ultimately, enter the United States." (Saul Steinberg Foundation)
The present work also features a number of rubber stamps, a characteristic Steinbergian device, which had had entered the vocabulary of his art around 1951, when he began to contextualize drawings with the addition of ready-made stationer's stamps. By the mid-1960s, he had graduated to using stamps made from his own designs, sometimes applying them to compositions in other media or overtaking an entire sheet, the stamps serving to "parody the political and social world." (Quoted by Eli Waldron, Publishers Weekly, July 5, 1973)
The Romanian American cartoonist and illustrator Saul Steinberg was famed worldwide for giving graphic definition to the postwar age, and had one of the most remarkable careers in American art. While renowned for the covers and drawings that appeared in The New Yorker for nearly six decades (including his View of the World from 9th Avenue, which graced the cover of the March 29, 1976 edition of the magazine), he was equally acclaimed for the drawings, paintings, prints, collages, and sculptures he exhibited internationally in galleries and museums. He described himself as "a writer who draws" and defined drawing as "a way of reasoning on paper." 
"Throughout his long career, he used drawing to think about the semantics of art, reconfiguring stylistic signs into a new language suited to the fabricated temper of modern life. Sometimes with affection, sometimes with irony, but always with virtuoso mastery, he peeled back the carefully wrought masks of 20th-century civilization. Steinberg crafted a rich and ever-evolving idiom that found full expression through these parallel yet integrated careers. Such many-leveled art, however, resists conventional critical categories. "I don't quite belong to the art, cartoon or magazine world, so the art world doesn't quite know where to place me," he said. He was a modernist without portfolio, constantly crossing boundaries into uncharted visual territory. In subject matter and styles, he made no distinction between high and low art, which he freely conflated in an oeuvre that is stylistically diverse yet consistent in depth and visual imagination." (Saul Steinberg Foundation)
Described as "one of the most unquenchably energetic figures in the public musical life of the USA," (New Grove), among many accomplishments, Alexander Schneider was a member of the legendary Budapest String Quartet and a guest conductor of major orchestras around the world. A recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors, he was the founding Artistic Director of the annual New York String Orchestra Seminar, one of the country's most acclaimed professional training programs for young musicians at Carnegie Hall, which is a major beneficiary of grants from the Alexander Schneider Foundation. 
These two dynamic forces in art and in music in the second half of the 20th century happened to be life-long friends, part of a closely-knit circle of some of the world's leading artists, musicians, photographers and actors, who often gathered at Schneider's loft building on Manhattan's east side.