Sauce Dish c. 1938

Isidore Steinberg’s ‘Sauce Dish’ is a drawing on paper, a quiet little study. You can see the soft hatching of blue pencil, building up the curved form of the glass. Imagine Steinberg’s hand moving across the paper, gently coaxing the object into being. It's funny, isn't it? To spend time drawing something so simple, so everyday. But that's what artists do, they pay attention to the things we overlook. It's as if Steinberg is saying, “Look, even a sauce dish can be beautiful, can be worthy of our gaze." I feel like there's an echo here of other artists who have found beauty in the mundane, like Morandi with his bottles. And isn’t that the task of the artist, always, to show us how to see, how to find the extraordinary in the ordinary?