The Brooklyn Rail

Steinberg is renowned and beloved for the New Yorker drawings and covers that he did for almost six decades and is admired for the many international exhibitions that featured his drawings, prints, collages, and sculptures. Born in Romania in 1914 and escaping Fascist Italy in 1942, Steinberg arrived in Manhattan and became a citizen in 1943, although he always maintained the vantage point of an objective bystander. Moving freely between cartoons, magazines, and art, disregarding distinctions between high and low art, Steinberg defied categorization within the art world. Drawing and storytelling are his magic powers, to which he added wit, humor, irony, and affection to make sense of and comment on the postwar years.

Feintuch, born in 1953 in New Jersey, started out as an abstract painter, earning a BFA from Cooper Union in 1974 and an MFA from Yale in 1976, where he studied when minimalism and geometric abstraction were dominant. Captivated by Northern Renaissance and Italian fifteenth and sixteenth-century paintings for the psychological associations generated by their strange and exaggerated images, as well as Philip Guston for the personal, psychological, and sociopolitical references in his tragicomic figurative paintings, Feintuch turned to figuration to engage directly with issues of human frailty. Paintings of unflattering nude self-portraits from behind, or fragments of his feet, arms, or hands holding an object in spare, indeterminate spaces, Feintuch’s ungainly, cartoonish subjects have a commanding physical presence and ethereal luminosity resulting from a laborious process of layering thin polymer emulsion on aluminum-faced, honeycomb panels.

Walking into Sunset Emergency, one is acutely aware of the predominance of spare, minimal compositions with open spaces, skies, and lots of clouds. Throughout the two rooms of Feintuch’s paintings and Steinberg’s drawings and reliefs, one is also cognizant of works peopled with figures but without faces or features. Saturated pink and blue fresco-like grounds distinguish Feintuch’s paintings from Steinberg’s graphic journeys with eloquent lines, rubber stamps, and washes of color on white paper. All of the works portray succinct if oblique narratives rendered by two master storytellers in command of their crafts—Steinberg, who describes himself as “a writer who draws,” and Feintuch, a theatrical painter of light, color, line, and stroke.

Puffy clouds in picturesque skies dominate Steinberg’s Cartes Postales (1969), a multi-image landscape with tiny, indistinguishable figures and trees. The clouds form a witty repartee with the billowing clouds in Feintuch’s Assumption (2013), from which stick out the artist’s naked, bruised feet and ankles of the same pink hue as the sky. This Steinberg work and others like it in the show are based on clichéd vistas seen on tourist postcards. Seductive, minimalist landscapes, they are intentionally disingenuous to call out the pictorial posturing seen throughout the history of landscape painting. Steinberg’s irreverence towards landscape is matched by Feintuch’s parodies of the pretentiousness of gesture and subject matter. The Assumption in Catholic theology refers to Mary’s being spared the natural process of death and decay and taken directly into heaven. Coopting the title for his painting, Feintuch combines the sublime with the ridiculous—alluding to religiosity by suspending his body in a heavenly setting and invoking the absurd with his feet jutting out of the clouds like those of the Wicked Witch of the East.

The Venice Table (1979) is a carved and painted still life/portrait as a wall relief of arranged objects and images representing Steinberg in his life and creative process. Gulliver Table (1986) is a remarkable, life-sized sculpture of the artist’s worktable, with every element and detail handmade in unpainted wood and outlined in pencil along its contours to emphasize the artifice behind its making and existence. His art-making tools, along with drawn and painted iterations of his art, come together in tongue-in-cheek self-portraits, albeit more understated than Feintuch’s more conspicuously sardonic self-portrayals. In Rabble II (2010), for example, the artist paints himself from behind, his boxer shorts pulled down to the middle of his ass. Blended into the spatially indistinct pink ground with his arm raised as if in protest, he scarcely looks like a threat. In Protest (2008), a partially sketched, indeterminate group of men (presumably all the artist) are seen pressed against each other from behind in boxer shorts with raised arms. One of the figures faces the viewer, his face covered by a raised arm holding a cluster of grapes while the other arm hangs down by his side holding a club that looks like a flaccid member. A sad Bacchus, but hardly a menacing protester.

The show’s title, Sunset Emergency, inverts the words of Feintuch’s Emergency (Sunset) (2022), a tall, skinny painting featuring an elongated weedy arm rising upwards in a blue sky, the hand clutching the handle of an inverted, proportionately large empty red bucket labelled “FIRE.” Is this the hand of the artist hero coming to the rescue of an unidentified danger with a bucket that has no water? Steinberg’s Untitled (1972) is more inscrutably cheeky in its exquisitely rendered desert landscape of puzzling details, including a pyramid, a band of water, small indistinct figures moving without purpose, and a vast sky of pale-colored washes articulated with his signature rubber stamps to denote the sun and who knows what. In Sunset Emergency, Steinberg’s wit and ironic detachment meet Feintuch’s humor and self-deprecation in poking fun at the pretentiousness of art’s grand aspirations. Seen side by side, their works designate a space where posers are not welcome.