Memorabilia Montage

When asked for an artist's statement for the catalog of Dorothy Miller's "Fourteen Americans" exhibition at MoMA in 1946, Steinberg turned in a small piece of paper inscribed with what he would come to call "false handwriting": three lines of ersatz cursive, concluding with a half-legible signature. Through the mid-1950s, he went on to create dozens of "false documents," including diplomas, passports, ex-votos, and diary pages, which he pushed ever nearer the forger's art through the inclusion of false stamps, false coffee stains, false creases, and false editorial comments. "People who like relics ... get excited not about the saint but about the saint's bones," Steinberg once told Dore Ashton. "What they want of Rimbaud is not the poetry but the button torn from his jacket." Memorabilia Montage imitates a collector's framed set of fetishized keepsakes. There are two portrait photographs (one a faded "albumen print" with inscription, the other an impenetrably dark cracked tintype, simulated on paper in two shades of shellac); letters on (real) stationery from hotels in London and in Nice (where Steinberg resettled his parents in 1950 after securing their emigration out of postwar Romania); a severely ink-stained and crossed-out manuscript page (bearing a real signature and date); and the florid autograph of an anonymous grandee. This is the first of Steinberg's false document pieces to join the Morgan's collection, which includes forty-one other works by the artist, spanning the period from his arrival in the United States in 1942 until his final years in the 1990s.