Parenting & Family Quote by Saul Steinberg

Steinberg is claiming a kind of artistic loophole: he never stopped doing the thing school trains you to outgrow. The line reads like a modest confession, but it’s also a quiet flex. “Among the few” sets up an elite minority, yet the elite credential isn’t pedigree or technique - it’s continuity. He positions “childhood drawing” not as a phase to be corrected but as a language worth “continuing and perfecting,” turning innocence into craft without sanding off its weird edges.

The subtext is a critique of the academy’s interruption: training as a break in perception, a system that replaces direct, improvisational seeing with rules, hierarchies, and taste-policing. Steinberg doesn’t deny skill; he denies the conventional route to it. That’s important because his work (especially in the mid-century New Yorker universe) thrives on looking deceptively simple while doing something sophisticated: compressing politics, urban life, and identity into lines that feel both naive and razor-intelligent. Childlike here doesn’t mean unserious; it means unembarrassed by play, exaggeration, and the crooked truth a cartoon can tell faster than a paragraph.

Context matters: Steinberg was an immigrant modernist who moved through architecture, design, and illustration while never fully accepting the fine-art world’s purity tests. By framing academic training as “traditional interruption,” he’s arguing that institutional legitimacy can be the enemy of continuity - and that the most advanced move might be to protect the earliest way you learned to make meaning: a line that thinks while it wanders.