Art & Creativity Quote by Saul Steinberg

Steinberg’s line cuts with an artist’s cynicism about how “beauty” gets smuggled into culture: not as an individual reality, but as a symbolic role. “Totem” is the tell. It’s not a compliment; it’s a demotion from personhood to icon, an object that organizes other people’s fantasies. By the time she’s “Madonna, a queen, a sphinx,” she’s been turned into a portable mythology: purity, power, mystery. Three archetypes, all high-status, all claustrophobic.

The intent feels less like hating beauty than distrusting what beauty makes other people do - especially painters, who can pretend they’re celebrating a subject while actually embalming her into a type. Steinberg, a master of drawing-as-commentary, is pointing at representation as a kind of violence: the portrait doesn’t just depict; it assigns. The “only” lands like a verdict on the visual economy itself: once beauty enters the room, nuance exits. You don’t get to be complicated; you get to be legible.

Context matters: Steinberg worked in a 20th-century art world obsessed with signs, advertising, and the cartoon logic of modern life. In that landscape, the beautiful woman becomes the ultimate logo, instantly readable, endlessly reproducible. The sphinx image sharpens the irony: she’s framed as unknowable, but that “mystery” is just another costume we put on her so we don’t have to ask who she is when no one is looking.