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40 Clement Greenberg “Steig’s Cartoons: Review of All Embarrassed by William Steig” The Nation, 3 March 1945. Reprinted in Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism: Vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949, pp. 10–11. Ed. John O’Brian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.© 1986 by Clement Greenberg and John O’Brian. The mating of drawing with caption has produced a new but very dependent and transitory pictorial genre. The future will be more informed than delighted by it. We can still relish the brush-drawing on a Greek vase for its own sake as a drawing— whether fitted happily or unhappily to the shape of the vessel. But to appreciate William Steig’s cartoons you have to get their point, and to get their point you have to be intimately acquainted with the contemporary American literate middle classes. And yet in spite of all this, Steig’s cartoons push and strain against the social and psychological limitations of the cartoon form and strive to become self-sufficient, time-transcending art. The quasi-abstract drawings in All Embarrassed are, though not necessarily the best, those which most visibly embody Steig’s aesthetic yearning. A good deal of automatism has gone into them as well as a full acquaintance with Klee, Picasso, and particularly Miró, yet they do not manage to escape the neatness and the formularization of the cartoon—nor will they until Steig forces himself to leave his forms more open and to take into greater account the shape of the page. It is no accident that the cartoon called Organism and Environment is the best in the book as a matter of drawing and picture composition. Once in a while Steig’s wit makes all the above irrelevant. I submit the cartoons called The Conversation Lags I, Misunderstanding, and Intrusion. If, however, Steig were somewhat more susceptible himself to those dangers of middle-class existence he too triumphantly points out, he would score much more frequently. ...

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