Anemones

A dispatch from our Art Editor on the art and illustrations in the Review’s January 16 issue.

The new year began with sad, heavy chords. I made a last-minute trip to Berlin for a funeral, while across the ocean friends were evacuating from their homes in Los Angeles. As the winds blew cinders and ash over Altadena and snow fell on the streets of Mitte, I found some brightness by painting anemones with my godson. 

We closed the January 16 issue right before the holidays, and a round of stiff drinks, painted by the New York–based artist Dike Blair, seemed an appropriate cover for the first issue of the new year. It looks like there might be plenty of reasons for drinkers to drink in 2025, as we face Trump’s inauguration and the ravages of our changing climate.

Inside, Elaine Blair writes about two books titled Consent, and she teases out the social and personal issues of giving and taking consent in sexual relationships. I asked the Berlin-based illustrator Simone Goder for a double portrait of the two writers, Vanessa Springora and Jill Ciment. 

We turned to the consistently wonderful Yann Kebbi to draw James Baldwin for Darryl Pinckney’s essay about JIMMY! God’s Black Revolutionary Mouth, an exhibition at Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. When I e-mailed him, Kebbi immediately replied, “Oh that would be an honor,” and soon sent a wise-eyed likeness of the great Baldwin. 

Peter Brooks writes about a new translation by Peter Bush of Honoré de Balzac’s book The Lily in the Valley. Brooks’s description of the plot made me think immediately of Emmanuel Pierre’s passionate collages. Pierre was free, and after a back and forth about grapes and petals, he sent a wonderful scene depicting the book’s characters set among flowers and fruits. 

For Trevor Jackson on the crisis of capitalism, I thought that the designer and art director Matt Dorfman might have some ideas. He sent a simple, lovely illustration of an eagle with a penny in its beak, concisely showing the interplay of politics and economics. 

The series art in the issue is by the Parisian Fanny Blanc. 

I left our anemone paintings with my godson in Berlin and returned to the States in time to start a new issue, bracing myself for the rest of a year that started with fires and war.