J. Alfred Prufrock can keep his coffee spoons. I have measured out my life in Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker covers. His first drawing appeared in 1941, before I was born. A survey of his work for the magazine is a timeline of my own existence, marked along the way with rites of passage that correspond to his dates of publication.

Starting tomorrow, more than 50 of the artist’s original drawings for the magazine will be on view at PaceWildenstein. It promises to be a delicious exhibition, a rare opportunity to see the covers in their original state and in various renditions.

Born in Romania, Steinberg (1914-99) studied philosophy and literature in Bucharest, then enrolled to study architecture in Milan in 1933. He drew the whole time, paying bills by submitting cartoons to the satirical biweekly, Bertoldo. Italy’s anti-Semitic race laws of 1938 rendered nil his architectural diploma (issued to “Saul Steinberg, of the Hebrew race”), and in 1940 his residency papers ran afoul of officialdom. After being interned briefly in a prison camp in the Abruzzi, he fled the country.

Steinberg was waiting for a visa to come to the United States when he made his first submission to the New Yorker, and his contributions continued for nearly 60 years. In all, he produced 90 covers and more than 1,200 drawings, which made his name and the magazine’s almost synonymous.

Categories fall by the wayside in discussing Steinberg. He has been described variously as an illustrator draftsman, a cartoonist, or a Modernist without portfolio. All three fit; none is quite exact. Sui generis, he invented gnomic vignettes that navigated the prosperity of postwar America and its pitfalls with terse, punning economy. Steinberg’s gift for pointed compression is the hallmark of good cartooning; it is equally a quality of fine art, which seeks the core of any chosen set of intelligible relations.

The immediacy of actual drawings is necessarily diminished in reproduction. The grace of his line and its inflections – blithe and distinctive – is more strongly felt in the originals. That line stretches and contorts to express the unspeakable, sometimes bending to convey sadness or curling back on itself to suggest confusion, deep thought, or the creative process itself. No one could take a line out for a walk quite like Saul Steinberg.

“The Line,” on view for the first time here, is a trademark Steinbergian transmogrification from the 1950s: One unbroken, changeling line reinvents itself – from a pen mark to a clothesline, to railroad tracks, and more – as it travels across and around the page. After 30 feet of wandering, it returns to its origin in the artist’s madcap pen. A 1961 cover depicts an opera house, its orchestra pit filled with his characteristic false handwriting, which evokes a full symphony, the physical gestures of the musicians, and the clefs and bars of a composer’s musical notation, all at the same time.

Steinberg brought an enchanted eye to the vagaries of the High Art scale and his place on it: “People who see a drawing in the New Yorker will think automatically that it is funny because it is a cartoon. If they see it in a museum, they think it’s artistic; and if they find it in a fortune cookie it’s a prediction.”

That same, sly candor marks his drawings, making his hand an instrument for wry cultural examination. Steinberg considered drawing “a way of reasoning on paper,” and his adopt ed country gave him much to reason about: the masks of modernity, the bafflements of communication, American can-do vitality and vulgarity, together with misgivings about where these would take us in the 21st century.

Steinberg was a dual citizen: not only of the United States but also of the New Yorker. His loyalty to the magazine was rooted in the help it gave him in gaining admission to the country during wartime. Even after his reputation was established by museum shows, gallery exhibitions, and an international following, he continued to publish in the New Yorker, insisting it would be his patria forever.

The flavor of his drawings, the tongue-in-cheek generosity of them, is always apparent even when their meaning is not. “What do you make of this?” was a sure-fire conversation starter – as well as a signal of one’s own taste – for half a century among those who shared The New Yorker’s aspirations and aesthetic. Steinberg himself did not mind being thought undecipherable at times. He did not like being grasped too easily. Better to be misunderstood than to be obvious.

This exhibition coincides with publication of “Steinberg at the New Yorker” (Harry N. Abrams, 240 pages, $50), a collaboration of the New Yorker and the Saul Steinberg Foundation. Amply illustrated, the book opens with an intimate, anecdotal introduction by friend and colleague Ian Frazier. Joel Smith’s text, which draws on unpublished material from Steinberg’s papers, is informative and insightful. Both the book and the show are fine tributes to an American original, the postwar visual culture he helped create, and the magazine that conspired with him.

Until March 5 (52 E. 57th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, 212-421-3292). Prices: The gallery declined to disclose its prices.