The Romanian American cartoonist and illustrator Saul Steinberg was famed worldwide for giving graphic definition to the postwar age, and had one of the most remarkable careers in American art. While renowned for the covers and drawings that appeared in The New Yorker for nearly six decades (including his View of the World from 9th Avenue, which graced the cover of the March 29, 1976 edition of the magazine), he was equally acclaimed for the drawings, paintings, prints, collages, and sculptures he exhibited internationally in galleries and museums. He described himself as "a writer who draws" and defined drawing as "a way of reasoning on paper." 

"Throughout his long career, he used drawing to think about the semantics of art, reconfiguring stylistic signs into a new language suited to the fabricated temper of modern life. Sometimes with affection, sometimes with irony, but always with virtuoso mastery, he peeled back the carefully wrought masks of 20th-century civilization. Steinberg crafted a rich and ever-evolving idiom that found full expression through these parallel yet integrated careers. Such many-leveled art, however, resists conventional critical categories. “I don’t quite belong to the art, cartoon or magazine world, so the art world doesn’t quite know where to place me,” he said. He was a modernist without portfolio, constantly crossing boundaries into uncharted visual territory. In subject matter and styles, he made no distinction between high and low art, which he freely conflated in an oeuvre that is stylistically diverse yet consistent in depth and visual imagination." (Saul Steinberg Foundation)

Adolph Green was a playwright, performer and lyricist who had a remarkable six-decade collaboration with the equally multi-hyphenated Betty Comden. The duo co-authored such hit Broadway musicals as On the Town and Bells Are Ringing, as well as the screenplays for Singin' in the Rain and The Band Wagon. Phyllis Newman won a Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical for Green and Comden's Subways Are for Sleeping just two years after their wedding. They remained together until Green's death in 2002.

These two dynamic forces in art and in music in the second half of the 20th century happened to be life-long friends, part of a closely-knit circle of some of the world's leading artists, musicians, photographers and actors.