100 years, 5 covers: The ‘New Yorker’s art editor chooses her favorites from the last century

ResidentialBusiness · February 10

The cover process at The New Yorker is a beautifully inexact science.

Each week, longtime art editor Françoise Mouly presents editor David Remnick a range of options—some still in sketch form—and Remnick chooses the one that feels most apt for the cultural moment. It could be a cover about a breaking news story; it could be a seasonal cover, an evergreen cover (Mouly banks the latter two types throughout the year). But inevitably, somehow, whatever he chooses feels organic to the publication, if not inevitable.

“What makes The New Yorker unique is that, as a general-interest magazine, our covers aren’t tied to feature stories but spring from the artists’ own observations and interests,” Mouly detailed in an email exchange as she worked to finish production on the magazine’s landmark 100th anniversary issue. “The New Yorker cover stands as one of the last bastions of wordless storytelling in our culture, a place where an artist’s singular vision can still speak directly to readers. In an age when we’re all flooded with a torrent of anonymous, manufactured images, these carefully crafted covers serve as an antidote—each one signed by an artist, each one attempting to crystallize a moment or catalyze an idea.”

[Photo: Leila Abazine]

It’s a visual lineage that will be celebrated in the magazine’s centennial issue out this week—and in L’Alliance New York’s exhibition Covering The New Yorker, which runs through March 30. Co-curated by Mouly and Abrams Vice President and Publisher Rodolphe Lachat, the show features something readers have not seen before: original cover artwork from such luminaries as Maira Kalman, Barry Blitt, Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, Roz Chast, Anita Kunz, Saul Steinberg, and many others.

Artist & Curators group shot at January 21st opening. Top, from left: Jenny Kroik, Barry Blitt, Richard Siri, Ed Steed, Mark Ulriksen, Art Spiegelman, Kadir Nelson, Ed Sorel, Peter de Sève, Gracie Lynn Haynes, Victoria Tentler-Krylov, John Cuneo, Front: Françoise Mouly, Tatyana Franck, Rodolphe Lachat, Gayle Kabaker. [Photo: Rebecca Greenfield]

Speaking of those artists, Mouly considers the greatest accomplishment of her 30-plus year run to be the careful balance she has maintained between established contributors and new creatives who illustrate the covers. “I’ve never had to sacrifice new voices for old ones, or vice versa”, she says. As for the inexact science that underpins the cover process, she adores the job because it lacks formula, and says she’s amazed the work remains as challenging as when she first began. “The fact that I still can’t ‘phone it in’ after all these years is perhaps the greatest gift of this role.”

[Photo: Leila Abazine]

With the magazine turning 100 this week, we asked Mouly to select the top five New Yorker covers from her tenure. She admits that her selections would likely change on any given day—but either way, today these covers still land with the same power as they did when they first met the cultural moment in our mailbox. Or didn’t, regrettably, in the case of the last one …

Adrian Tomine’s “Missed Connection” (Nov. 8, 2004)

“Adrian Tomine is a perfect example of the kind of artist I love working with—he’s a marvelous short story teller. Cartoonists are intellectual athletes in that way: They have a lifetime habit of compressing complex ideas into a few pen marks. When Tomine first approached The New Yorker as a young, relatively unknown cartoonist, he already had a stylistically sharp ‘ligne claire’ style. Unlike other artists whom I would take to our library to study covers from the 1930s and ’40s, Tomine just needed the right story to tell.

“Having just arrived in New York, he noticed things that natives often forget, like how subway cars running on parallel tracks offer glimpses into other lives. When I asked him to consider ideas for our fiction issue, he began sketching this subway encounter. I suggested having the two characters read the same book. Tomine’s masterful composition makes this image perfect: We see only these two faces, and follow their gazes to each other. The use of color draws our eyes to the lightly sketched book. We know the trains will move in different directions and these strangers will lose each other. This is what I love—a picture that tells a complete story.”

Saul Steinberg’s “The Man in the Mirror” (Jan. 12, 1998)

“One of my greatest privileges when I started in 1993 was to be Saul Steinberg’s editor. I would go visit him regularly in his home, and spend wonderful hours in conversation (he talked, I listened). He told me about baseball, architecture, the O.J. Simpson story, Las Vegas—there was so much he loved about America. Then we’d look through his flat files, fishing for ideas. He was in his eighties then, and he would search through his thousands of sketches and doodles for ideas he hadn’t yet transformed into New Yorker covers. He was always careful not to repeat himself.

“When I discovered this particular drawing, it resonated deeply with me—it captured what artist Maira Kalman would later call ‘The Optimism of Breakfast.’ It brought back memories of my own father singing in the bathroom while shaving. Though Steinberg was dubious about whether the image was substantial enough for a cover, I encouraged him to develop it. Later, he gave me the original drawing—’this one is yours,’ he said—which is why the original is included in this exhibition.

“I learned so much from Steinberg: less is more, use color only when necessary, let ideas shine through simplicity. As Steinberg said of his work, ‘Once you’ve seen it, you can’t remember not having seen it.’ A good image can become a building block of thought, like implanting a new word into the language. That’s an awesome power for artists to have.”

Art Spiegelman and Mouly’s “Black on Black” (Sept. 24, 2001)

“On Sept. 11, 2001, my husband, Art Spiegelman, our daughter, and I stood four blocks away from the second tower as we watched it collapse in excruciatingly slow motion. Later, back in my office, I felt that the only appropriate solution would be to publish no cover image at all—an all-black cover. Then Art suggested adding the outlines of the two towers, black on black, which I drew. It conveyed something about the sudden absence in our skyline, the abrupt tear in the fabric of reality. From no image came the perfect image.”

Diana Ejaita’s “Iya Ni Wura” (“Mother Is Gold”) (May 13, 2019)

“Diana Ejaita, who divides her time between Lagos and Berlin, created this Mother’s Day cover as her first of many contributions to the magazine. I love that the image evokes patterns and colors that are common in Nigeria, and was delighted to see she included the keke in the background. It gives you a sense of place, yet it’s also universal, capturing an emotion every parent knows.

“The composition tells the story perfectly: A mother kneels to meet her child at eye level, making herself fully present. The child’s posture, the way she holds herself, suggests that she’s asserting her independence. It’s a tender portrait of maternal love preparing to let go.”

Roz Chast’s “Venus on The Beach” (Aug. 4, 2014)

“Though cell phones have dominated our reality for decades, The New Yorker rarely features them on its covers. If the magazine published every phone-related submission, there’d be room for nothing else. This exception to the rule, by Roz Chast, is particularly successful, however. Usually images of people on their phone focus on the screen. Here the phones all function as arrows, pointing us toward the alive and surprising. And this twist on Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus is a clever way for the cartoonist to use one old cliché to shed light on another.”

Coda: “Kamala” by Kadir Nelson (Nov. 18, 2024)

“On Nov. 5, 2024, I was preparing a cover that would celebrate the first woman president—just as I had done for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Kadir Nelson had created this painting as a celebration of the first woman, first Black and first Indian-American president. Despite editor David Remnick’s repeated requests for a Plan B, I had no other approved sketch in the works. Around 9:30 p.m. on election night, it became clear that the Harris cover would never be published. I turned to a rough sketch that Barry Blitt had sent in. I called him and asked for a finish. ‘When do you need it?’ he asked. ‘Now,’ I told him. I asked him to draw it very small, very quickly; to keep it gestural, to just spew it out. The resulting image was published in the morning.

“Powerful covers often emerge not from advance planning but from living through and feeling the moment. This is as true for me as the art editor as it is for the artists. And in the show, I just love the juxtaposition of these two images: the huge, masterful oil painting of Harris, which took weeks to complete and carried so much hope, and the tiny, dark ink stain next to it. It speaks volumes.”

View the full article

Sign In

100 years, 5 covers: The ‘New Yorker’s art editor chooses her favorites from the last century

Recommended Posts

ResidentialBusiness

Join the conversation