The Priest, the King and the Street Vendor: Urban Allegories in Saul Steinberg’s Strada Palas (1966)

Abstract

All parades are gatherings of curious collections, but the parades in the work of the architect-trained artist Saul Steinberg are like no others. In one particular drawing bearing the name of his childhood street, Steinberg intertwines two parades that bring forth recollections of his native Bucharest from the early decades of the twentieth century. Utilizing the focused lens of the festival, I will trace a microhistory where Steinberg constructs an allegorical narrative of the city as parade. While the city-fragment portrayed in the image is the eclectic Bucharest of the 1920s, it also makes larger, more important statements about cities as contested places of power, where the ordinary and the extraordinary, locals and guests inhabit, reclaim and negotiate the same places. The destabilizing condition of the festival is extended to the city as a whole, which thus turns into another parade of colliding, yet intertwined, fragments.

Keywords:

• Saul Steinberg
• Bucharest
• parade
• festival
• microhistory

Notes

1 Saul Steinberg and Aldo Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows (New York: Random House, 2002), 3.

2 Oxford English Dictionary, entries “festival,” “feast.”

3 Ibid., entry “fair.”

4 Ibid., entry “feria.”

5 Roger Caillois, Man and the Sacred (Glencoe: Free Press, 1959); Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959).

6 Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 119.

7 Gavin Grindon, “Revolutionary Romanticism: Henri Lefebvre’s Revolution-as-Festival,” Third Text 27, no. 2 (2013): 209.

8 Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performance Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 11.

9 Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (London: Routledge, 1995), 49.

10 Ibid., 89.

11 Ibid., 83.

12 Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know About It,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (Autumn 1993): 10–35.

13 Carlo Ginzburg and A. Davin, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Workshop no. 9 (Spring 1980): 5–36. Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4288283.

14 Jean-Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier Le Grand (Paris: Phaidon, 2014), 402–403. Le Corbusier is referring to Steinberg’s 1954 compilation of drawings, The Passport.

15 Joel Smith, Illuminations (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 106.

16 Ibid., 41.

17 Steinberg and Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 41.

18 The Saul Steinberg Papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA include collections of postcards, maps, process drawings, notes on dreams, letters and journal entries that reveal this desire to keep alive the memories of a place forever lost.

19 Steinberg and Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 42.

20 Ibid., 42–3.

21 Ibid., 43.

22 Romania became a republic after the forced abdication of King Michael I in 1947 under the pressure of the communist-dominated government, which had fraudulently won the 1946 elections.

23 Steinberg and Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 21.

24 Meteorites, Minotaur, Orpheus, Olympus, Ceres, Jupiter and Uranus (author’s translation).

25 Journal entry from Thursday July 4, 1991, Saul Steinberg Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, formerly Box 75. Between the two world wars, Calea Victoriei was one of the most bustling streets in Bucharest.

26 Steinberg and Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 3.

27 Tom Gallagher, Theft of a Nation (London: Hurst & Co., 2005), 29; Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 43.

28 Gallagher, Theft of a Nation, 29.

29 Andreea Mihalache, “Between Church and State: The Competition for the Romanian Patriarchal Cathedral, Bucharest, 2002,” in The Architectural Competition: Research, Inquiries, Experiences, ed. M. Ronn, R. Kazemian and J. E. Anderson (Stockholm: Axl Books, 2010), 490–507.

30 Both braga and salep are drinks that originated in the Ottoman empire. Braga is a refreshing drink made from fermented grains (wheat, millet, etc.). Salep is obtained from grinding the bulbs of certain orchids and is used in the preparation of a hot drink with milk, for making ice cream or in traditional medicine.

31 A housing typology developed in Paris from the eighteenth century onward, the immeuble de rapport is a multistory building with apartments for rent and/or purchase that was assimilated in Romanian architecture, particularly in Bucharest at the turn of the twentieth century. In many instances, these buildings provided opportunities for experimenting with the emerging modernist architecture.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andreea Mihalache

Andreea Mihalache is Assistant Professor at Clemson School of Architecture, SC, USA. Her current research examines intersections of architecture, visual arts, literature, philosophy and aesthetics in the middle decades of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the work of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and the architect-trained artist Saul Steinberg.