Untitled [Mask]

The art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote that Steinberg had introduced a new subject matter into postwar art: “the mystery of individual identity.” Between 1959 and 1963, the artist collaborated with the photographer Inge Morath, having friends and acquaintances wear paper bags on which he had drawn fantastic faces and then posing them for photographs. The resulting images present an array of attitudes, postures, and mannerisms, but the mask drawings themselves are ripe with innuendo.