Louis Faurer
1916-2001
1949
Gelatin silver print
Sheet: 14 x 11 inches
Purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund.
2018.55
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See print.
Summary:
Louis Faurer for Saul Steinberg (American, born Romania, 1914-1999). A photograph from an aerial perspective of a drawing of a naked woman in a bathtub. The drawing of her body is submerged up to her choker necklace. She has short curly hair. The faucets for the tub are to the right, tiled floors are visible to the left of the tub.
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© Estate of Louise Faurer.
By the late 1940s, the artist Saul Steinberg was firmly established as a star graphic contributor to The New Yorker magazine. As if in reaction to the absence of photography in the magazine's pages, he began to experiment with merging his linear style of drawing with camera images. He contributed two guest photo-cartoon features to the influential but short-lived fashion magazine Flair (1950-51), but saved some of his most ambitious efforts, including Woman in Tub, for his 1953 book The Passport. Louis Faurer's photograph (the Morgan's print is a close variant to the published version) promotes Steinberg's bather to the status of a camera-documented reality: a woman as fully present in time and space as ripples on the surface of her bathwater.