People talk about the timelessness of early New Yorker covers, but there were occasions even then when New Yorker covers were right on the money in terms of catching the moment.
That was certainly true at the beginning, under Harold Ross, the founder and first editor. The insistence on not doing anything connected to the moment started under William Shawn, who became editor in the nineteen-fifties, and that mind-set was totally locked in by the seventies.
What’s striking is that when you reviewed the previous thirty-five hundred issues of the magazine, you were drawn to Ross’s New Yorker. You show an active interest in the covers of the first twenty or thirty years and less in the later ones.
For me, that’s partly because in Ross’s magazine the artists and the writers were viewed as equally important. In Shawn’s New Yorker, artists were considered an important component of the magazine, but in terms of intellectual vitality, there was less back-and-forth, less cross-pollination, than there had been in Ross’s magazine. Gradually, as the magazine’s focus shifted, and it became less a humor magazine, the artists became somewhat marginalized.
But isn’t it the case that the cover of a Shawn New Yorker functioned as a kind of moral center of an idealized world at a time when the magazine’s contents included all the things that were threats to that world, so that the quietness of that cover operated as an assertion in its own right? If there was a peaceful cover of a suburban lawn, inside the magazine there was also a review of Michael Harrington’s “The Other America,” and that cover said, “You know, it would be nice for everybody to have this kind of peacefulness, but let’s not fool ourselves.” It was a very layered cover, but it wasn’t removed from the world, though on a different magazine it could have been. One could imagine a magazine with that cover that was completely oblivious of the world and that talked only about the comforts of life–say, House & Garden.
I agree with you that a magazine’s cover always posits the ideal world and the ideal reader and the ideal that the magazine itself aspires to, because magazines are all about aspirations. I also agree that it was a conscious decision on Shawn’s part to divorce the cover from the contents. And I think he could do that because at the time the magazine was extremely successful and self-confident. It had an audience of readers who, in the privacy of their own homes, in their back yards, were taking the time to read an article about what was going on in the inner city. But at a certain point the dynamics of the magazine had to change.
Granted, there’s absolutely no way that the old, Shawnian covers would have been appropriate for the magazine under Tina Brown or the magazine thereafter. That’s not a value judgment–it’s just a fact. The challenge becomes to figure out a different way.
Right, because the magazine itself had to adapt to its time and the cover had to reflect that.
The role of the cover in Shawn’s New Yorker, however, was different from its role in either Ross’s or Tina’s. The covers for the four issues in which Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” ran, for example, seemed almost militantly not to have anything to do with what was inside the magazine. I would argue that precisely because the magazine was into such terrifying stuff–Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Jonathan Schell’s “Fate of the Earth,” Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem”–and expressed such moral seriousness, the cover functioned as a kind of cordon sanitaire between the world and the heavy stuff inside. In other words, you had quiet, pastoral covers about peace (in some kind of E. B. White-like way), about a fantasy of order and so on, which allowed you between the covers to have, say, the most vivid reporting on Vietnam of its time. Similarly, as long as you had a serious Notes and Comment at the beginning of Talk of the Town, you could have Donald Barthelme and all kinds of other wacked-out stuff in the rest of the magazine. There was a kind of moral groundedness that allowed the funny stuff to get funnier and weirder.
I think that’s totally accurate, but that cordon sanitaire kept out the artists who were defining their time. In the late sixties and seventies, there was a visually engaged narrative going on in the underground press that was in direct contrast to The New Yorker. In fact, The New Yorker went so far in the other direction that it created a generation gap for the artists. There was also definitely a geographical shift in the focus of the contributors at that point; many didn’t live in New York. They came in once a week and they submitted their drawings, but their thinking process was not engaged in the same way as when they had been part of the life of the city. They also were not engaged in the cultural dialogue that was taking place in other media. No artist was working both for The New Yorker and for the underground press. That wasn’t even conceivable.
Well, things have certainly changed in that regard. A remarkable amount of controversy has surrounded many of the more recent covers. I assume that was in part your intention.
I think one of the reasons that people tend to feel alienated from the political process and from the media nowadays is a surfeit of images that are all equivalent. We have so many mass-produced, commercially oriented images, but very few individually produced images that come from a thinking brain and address a similarly thinking reader. I think artists have the ability to capture certain moments and to enhance reality to a point where it becomes shared reality. The artist doesn’t function in a vacuum. He doesn’t create the feeling that is in the air, but he has a way of catalyzing it and forcing one’s attention to it.
The air, as it were, is heavy-laden, charged with potential. The artist serves as a sort of lightning strike–his intervention is almost literally electrifying–and I suppose it’s no wonder that some readers occasionally end up feeling singed. Of course, it’s an old story.
Precisely. What’s interesting to me is to remember that there was a time, at the turn of the last century, when the illustrated press and its artists were not just decorators of other people’s ideas; they were providing the cultural dialogue.
Providing and provoking...
The artists for those magazines were expressing strong convictions and delivering an editorial message–partly because good drawings are so efficient. Every revolution needs a poster artist. Radical humor magazines played a crucial role in European cultural and political life at that time. There was Punch in England, which had started in 1841, and the French humor sheets, such as Le Rire and Le Chat Noir, at the end of the nineteenth century. They, in turn, inspired the German Simplicissimus, which, though it began as an illustrated literary journal, had its greatest impact through the work of its artists and cartoonists. Simplicissimus attacked the Kaiser, the government, the clergy. In the early years, its artists were jailed, and the magazine was censored and banned. In 1901, France saw the advent of an anarchist publication, L’Assiette au Beurre–a lavishly produced magazine devoted entirely to drawings. For artists at the turn of the century, politics was extremely important. They had to take a stand on their conception of art’s role in society. Many of those involved with L’Assiette au Beurre made a commitment to art as political satire, to art for the masses. These European magazines were later the inspiration for The Masses, a left-wing magazine started here in 1911 that aspired to combine art and literature with a radical stance. I don’t think, however, that such left-wing publications were the primary inspiration for Harold Ross. He was more influenced by the American magazines that had come out of the older Punch and Le Rire, as well as by Judge and Life (the humor magazines) here in the States.
What influenced you?
My entire generation in France came of age with Hara-Kiri Hebdo, an anarcho-left-wing weekly humor magazine. What everyone would rush to see in it–and all that anyone remembers now–is the work of the cartoonists. For me, it’s an inspiration to know that there have been all these different publications in which artists have played a central role in shaping the world around them. I started out in this field by learning to operate my own printing press and running off artists’ pamphlets. I have immense respect and appreciation for artists such as Saul Steinberg, who have consistently turned away from the lure of the world of fine art, and the fossilization of the creative process that can go on there, because they believe in the power of the printed page and because they want their work in the hands of many, many readers rather than exclusively on the walls of the very, very few.
Do you give artists ideas for their covers?
In editorial meetings, for instance, someone will say, “We should have an image about roller blades.” And then somebody will exclaim, “Oh, that’s a great idea” and I can’t help it, I have to say, “Sorry, that’s not an idea, that’s a topic.” It’s a beginning of something, but it will exist only once an artist comes up with an idea about that topic that makes it resonant.
Visual storytelling, or visual narrative, is about staging, about getting the right order, just the way a good storyteller has to tell it in the right order.
Timing and staging are everything. I remember a back-and-forth with Peter de Sève, which led to “Tailed” (page 95). At the time, women who wore fur coats were being attacked by animal rights advocates. That was definitely a good topic to address, and it came up in my conversations with Peter about possible winter covers. He faxed a rough sketch of a bunch of animals lying in wait on a street corner; on the other side of the page a woman wearing a fur coat is walking her dog. It was good, it was funny, but the composition was too much like a split screen: you saw her, you saw them, but you never quite got to that moment of meeting. I told Peter, "I think you have something there," and asked him to keep going.
Peter has done a lot of work in animation, and you can see that he’s very good at funny animal cartoons. He also had this Upper East Side woman, a Hokinson lady, the perfect character to be wearing a fur coat. The Hokinson lady, as defined by Helen Hokinson in countless New Yorker cartoons and covers of the nineteen-thirties (see page 102), has been a rich source of inspiration for several of our contemporary artists. At any rate, Peter’s main characters were right; now it was a matter of staging the idea correctly. He quickly moved into this new image, which has the woman, alone on a deserted sidewalk by Central Park, seeing an animal behind her (without turning her head–one of the conventions of cartooning). Out of all the animals in his first sketch he first selected the bear, then the raccoon, who, because he has a bandit mask, can be both menacing and cute at the same time. De Sève played with the scale of this rather large lady followed by this tiny raccoon which is nonetheless very full of itself. And then he set up another tiny animal ahead of her, her nervous little pet, and balanced her in the ambiguity between animal and animal. And it’s perfect. It’s absolutely Peter’s idea and fully his realization, but I feel that our dialogue was useful in encouraging him and in refining the concept. That’s what I mean when I say that, in my own way, I try to do for artists what I imagine The New Yorker under Shawn did for writers.
How else do you try to intervene in the artistic process?
An image has to work on many different levels, and it has to read instantly to make its point. A lot of my dialogue with the artists centers on that. If I were to tell an artist, I think it would be better if you did this in blue rather than in red, because that’s my aesthetic judgment, I’d get nowhere, because it would just be my aesthetic judgment versus his. So instead I’ll say, well, I left your sketch on the wall and nobody got it, or they got it after two and a half seconds, therefore you need to address this. That’s not an exaggeration. I put a cover sketch on the wall and I watch people look at it, and I time the laugh, or the “Hmm,” or the “Wow!” Often I do this when other artists come over to my office. And when I hear that “Wow!” I know they’re furious because they’ve seen something that’s really good and it’s making them jealous. But when they go “Hmm, well,” and they’re shaking their heads from one side to the other and they’re spending a long time with it, then I know that the image still needs fine-tuning.
Do you have favorite images among all the ones you’ve worked on?
My honest answer to this question is that what I like is the moment when one week we are running a cover by Saul Steinberg and the next week a cover by R. Crumb and the week after that a cover by Bruce McCall and on and on. What I take pride in is being able to have access to all those artists and to juxtapose their work and to be at a magazine that’s broad enough to encompass them all. There’s no longer a house look at The New Yorker. It’s something I certainly tried to avoid when I did my own magazine, RAW. There we tried to bring together as many different styles, as many different artists, and as many different sensibilities as possible, and I think that’s also one of the strengths of The New Yorker. Each writer has his voice, and it’s the overall quality that distinguishes a New Yorker piece. In the same way, it’s the quality of the visual comment that makes a cover feel like a New Yorker cover, the fact that it actually has something to say and says it so well.
Your job reminds me of a scene in the film “Jonah Who Will Be Twenty-five in the Year 2000.” The old locomotive engineer says, “Well, it’s one thing to be in a train as a passenger and see the world passing by.” In a certain sense your knowing the thirty-five hundred covers, and seeing the past eight years of covers, which are spread out along the walls outside your office, can be compared to the view out the window of that train, and the rest of us, getting the magazine every week, have pretty much the same view. The engineer, however, continues, “But it’s completely different to be in the front, where the world is coming at you and you are going into the world.” It seems to me, sitting with you here in this office, that it’s almost as if we were in the engineering cab, or some kind of cockpit, with that fax machine giving you advance warning of things coming at you. You have the whole train of knowledge, the history of The New Yorker, the history of L’Assiette au Beurre, the history of Simplicissimus, of the Ross New Yorker, the Shawn New Yorker. And then coming out of that fax machine are the ideas that are plunging you into the up-to-date and even before the up-to-date. It’s an interesting place to be.
It really is. I feel privileged and I’m especially grateful to the artists who have hung in there against all the odds. The rewards are so paltry and the venues so few for somebody who is able to draw and who is able to think, for an artist who can come up with something interesting and funny, for an artist who is engaging with his times. I’m grateful to all the artists who are still artists in this day and age and haven’t become scriptwriters for Hollywood (though quite a few of the artists do that as well). Still, the core of their work, their true inspiration, the source of their thinking process and their creative life is drawing.
And drawing is a wonderful word: drawing on, drawing from, being drawn to...
And I’m also grateful to The New Yorker, because the immense respect accorded to the magazine–the poetry, the cartoons, the fiction, the reporting pieces, the critics, The Talk of the Town–works to give credibility and added import to the artists’ statements. Putting drawings on the cover of The New Yorker keeps artists at the center of the cultural dialogue, and I can’t think of a better place for them to be.
