When the family house was sold upon his mother’s death in 1994, Steffen moved into a small room in a men’s retirement home in northern Chicago.
[3] Upon his move, Steffen was prepared to throw away a vast body of drawings but instead gave pieces to his nephew, Christopher Preissing, who had shown interest in his work.
Before he died, this voice was captured in a recording was made of him reading “Jabberwocky” from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1872), a book both dear and inspirational to him.
Beyond this immediate sphere, Steffen’s subject matter extended to the past and the general: his mother, her wheelchair and bed; showgirls from the bar he frequented during his school days; scenes from Elgin, Illinois; a woman he had loved before his hospitalization; female nudes and crucifixions.
Steffen experimented with his repeated subject matter; he began to merge the human form with plants or with the abstract tobacco stains and tar splotches he saw on neighborhood sidewalks.