This thirty-second art newsletter, covering the art and illustrations in our May 15 and May 29 issues, comes from the Martha Graham School’s Spring Showcase, where my daughter and her dance class opened the show with a demonstration of the Graham technique.
The May 15 issue was our annual Art Issue, and this year’s cover is by the artist Tacita Dean, the subject of a wonderful essay inside by Sam Needleman. Needleman, an assistant editor at the Review, writes about Dean’s major solo show, at the Menil Collection in Houston, alongside three recent books about her. She is one of my favorite artists, and I’ve long admired the range of mediums she engages with, the skill of her drawing, and the depth of her thought and curiosity. For the cover, we chose from a series of lithographs that Dean made in 2018 with found postcards, many featuring photographs of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century actors. (Our choice features the English actor Wilson Barrett as Hamlet.)
Most of the art in the Art Issue comes directly from the subjects, but there were a few commissions and pairings. I find myself turning to Vivienne Flesher for portraits of enigmatic women writers, living or dead, and she delivered a pink-bobbed Claire Messud for Lisa Halliday’s review of Messud’s latest novel, This Strange Eventful History. Noah Feldman’s essay about the Supreme Court made me think of the designer Matt Dorfman’s depictions of columns and his constitutional themes.
For Madeleine Thien’s essay about the Chinese writer Fang Fang, I approached Manshen Lo. I had been hoping to work with her since I saw her cover design for Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You. She’s not necessarily known for portraiture, but she delivered a striking, oblique profile of Fang Fang. Lo described her sketch in an e-mail to me: “A woman is standing in front of an old window frame decorated traditionally. She stares into the darkness inside the window while sunlight comes from behind her, casting some shadows of the trees on her and the wall.” Her spacious approach makes for a particularly subtle portrait.
The cartoonist Harry Bliss has been steadily and graciously sending compliments about the magazine’s covers and artwork for a few years now, and while I love his dog-centric cartoons, I wasn’t sure how I might assign him. Then he showed me his journals, which included many lovely high-contrast portraits. When I read Nathaniel Rich’s review of a new translation of the Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz’s novel Great Fear on the Mountain and looked up photos of Ramuz, I immediately thought of Bliss. I described one of his final drafts as Seurat-like, and he agreed that we should use the “Seuraty version.”
I usually commission portraits from Henning Wagenbreth, so he seemed surprised when I asked if he’d apply his rigorously chaotic style to Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s essay about the plight of the Chagos Islanders. Wagenbreth’s final submission depicts the archetypal “Chagossian poet, with all his belongings in shopping bags walking home to his island over the water, showing the strong belief that the Chagossians will return home one day.”
The series art in the issue, titled Arrangements, is by the Los Angeles–based painter Zack Rosebrugh.
The cover of the May 29 issue features another favorite artist of mine, the graphic novelist Olivier Schrauwen, whose novel Sunday Chris Ware reviews inside. I had wanted to use this image, which is a page from the book, on previous covers, but it had always been bumped for one reason or another. I was happy to use it in conjunction with an essay about Schrauwen’s “masterpiece,” as Ware describes it.
Hari Kunzru cites the work of the illustrator David Dees a number of times in his article about conspiracist pseudoscience and healthy-living grifters. When I looked up Dees’s work I knew I couldn’t use it, lest our readers think, at first glance (and you only get one first glance), that we had started publishing, as Kunzru describes Dees’s art, “baroque and frankly paranoid ‘political art.’”
Instead I sent the essay to the designer Paul Sahre, who pieced together a layered word-collage of phrases and ideas employed by the alarmist subcultures behind, among other things, the antivax movement.
For Alice Kaplan’s essay about Rachel Cockerell’s memoir, the Berlin-based illustrator Sophia Martineck drew Cockerell in front of a corkboard of artifacts, documents, and photos from her family’s history. To accompany Anna Della Subin’s essay about the Iraqi-American poet Dunya Mikhail, our online editor Max Nelson suggested the painting After Enheduana, by the artist Yamini Nayar. Della Subin describes a dream Mikhail had of meeting Princess Enheduana. As she talks with the Sumerian priestess, the poet realizes that she is actually talking to Siri, who “emerged suddenly from my phone, like a djinn who would grant me all of my wishes.”
For Sue Halpern’s review of Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s memoir about her years working at Facebook, Hanna Barczyk drew Wynn-Williams among the emoticons and flotsam of the social media giant; and for Linda Greenhouse’s essay about attempts to desegregate schools in Detroit, I turned to the English artist Roderick Mills. His multicolored overlay of several scenes was Mills’s first piece for the Review.
Andrew Delbanco’s article about F. Scott Fitzgerald focused on erotic anticipation, which gave Grant Shaffer plenty of cues for the direction his portrait took. Shaffer sent us no fewer than seven versions of a lip-smacked F. Scott.
The series art in the issue, Crowns, is by the writer, designer, broadcaster, and artist Debbie Millman, who recently published the book Love Letter to a Garden. When she sent her abstract spots to me, she wrote: “I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership, dictatorship, authoritarianism, monarchies and so on and so on. It inspired this collection of illustrations that I’m calling ‘Crowns,’ as they are all (very) non-representational crowns.”
The final piece the Advance Performance Workshop dancers performed was Martha Graham’s Prelude to Action, which she choreographed in 1936 after declining to participate in the Summer Olympics in Berlin that year. It was a direct response to the circumstances surrounding Adolf Hitler’s Games, and the growing threat of fascism.
English (US) · 