Where Have All the Great "New Yorker" Illustrators Gone?

Riccardo Vecchio, "Bill Knott" (2017)

It pains me to say this, but New Yorker illustration isn’t as consistently interesting as it used to be. I miss the brilliant work of Luis Grañena, Robert Risko, André Carrilho, Edward Sorel, Ralph Steadman, Jorge Arevalo, Riccardo Vecchio, Marcellus Hall, David Hughes, Gerald Scarfe, Laurie Rosenwald, Edwin Fotheringham, Conor Langton, Marc Aspinall, Kirsten Ulve, among others. 

Remember this great Ralph Steadman?

It’s from James Wood’s “A Fine Rage” (The New Yorker, April 6, 2009), a critical essay on George Orwell.

Remember Edward Sorel’s wonderful flying, letter-shedding, double portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop for Dan Chiasson’s “Works on Paper” (The New Yorker, October 27, 2008)?

Here’s a beauty by Luis Grañena, from Anthony Lane’s “Command Performances” (The New Yorker, November 21, 2010), a review of Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech.

Remember the superb David Hughes portrait of Les Murray in Dan Chiasson’s “Fire Down Below” (The New Yorker, June 4, 2007)?

And who could forget the marvelous André Carrilho portrait of Lady Gaga and Beyoncé that appeared in “Goings On About Town,” June 27, 2011)?

And how about Conor Langton’s eye-catching, fractured-faced, multi-hued seance for David Denby’s “Under the Spell” (The New Yorker, July 20, 2014), a review of Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight)?

I could go on and on – so many inspired images to pick from. But in the last few years the overall quality has slipped. There are still pearls to be found [e.g., Riccardo Vecchio’s “Bill Knott” (2017); Andrea Ventura’s “Jenny Erpenbeck” (2017); this year’s Bendik Kaltenborn portrait of former Trump fixer Michael Cohen], but not as abundantly as before. 

Best of 2017: Illustrations

Bendik Kaltenborn, "RJD2" (2017)

Here are my favorite New Yorker illustrations of 2017:

1. Bendik Kaltenborn’s “RJD2,” for Matthew Trammell’s “Night Life: New Routes” (January 9, 2017).

2. Riccardo Vecchio’s “Bill Knott,” for Dan Chiasson’s “The Fugitive” (April 3, 2017).

3. Riccardo Vecchio’s “Fernando Pessoa,” for Adam Kirsch’s “Voices from the Void” (September 4, 2017).

4. Edward Sorel’s “Sketchbook: Whack Jobs” (September 11, 2017).

5. Andrea Ventura’s “Jenny Erpenbeck,” for James Wood’s “Strangers Among Us” (September 25, 2017).

6. Bob Staake’s “Philip Kerr,” for Jane Kramer’s “The Plot Thickens” (July 10 & 17, 2017).

7. Tom Bachtell’s “Michel Houellebecq,” for Lauren Collins’ “Sideline” (June 19, 2017).

8. Vincent Mahé’s “The Tank,” for Alex Ross’s “Tank Music” (July 24, 2017).

9. Gizem Vural’s “L. A. Rhapsody,” for Alex Ross’s “Classical Music: L. A. Rhapsody” (March 20, 2017).

10. Byron Eggenschwiler’s “The Dead,” for Hilton Als’s “Memento Mori” (December 4, 2017).

Heer's Heresy

Jeet Heer’s “Fire in the Hole: The New Yorker’s In-House Radicals” (Los Angeles Review of Books, August 2, 2012) gives William Shawn a bum rap. In his piece, Heer refers to “the interminable torpor produced by William Shawn’s editorial dotage of the 1970s and 1980s,” and to Shawn’s “perverse late-life preference for producing a sleep-inducing publication.” To appreciate just how wrong-headed Heer’s assessment is, consider that during the ’70s and ’80s The New Yorker published, among other great pieces, Robert A. Caro’s “The Power Broker,” Pauline Kael's "Raising Kane," C. D. B. Bryan’s “Friendly Fire,” Susan Sheehan’s “Is There No Place on Earth for Me?,” Anthony Bailey's "The Edge of the Forest,” Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” John McPhee’s “Coming into the Country,” Kenneth Tynan’s “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” Saul Bellow’s “A Silver Dish,” William Maxwell’s “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” Janet Malcolm’s “The Impossible Profession,” Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” Bill Barich's "Laughing in the Hills," Joseph Brodsky's "Flight from Byzantium." And this is just scratching the surface of The New Yorker’s rich content during the Shawn era. Clearly, these pieces, no matter what else might be said of them, aren’t “sleep-inducing”; they don’t produce “interminable torpor.” Quite the opposite; they are among the seventies’ and eighties’ most exciting, stimulating, brilliant writings. They were all shepherded into print under William Shawn’s ingenious editorship. 

Credit: The above portrait of William Shawn is by Edward Sorel; it appears in The New Yorker (July 2, 2012) as an illustration for John McPhee's "Editors & Publisher."

Pauline Kael and "Open Form"

A major strand in Pauline Kael’s governing aesthetic is the “open” approach to the movie frame. This is not an original observation. Louis Menand, in his “The Popist: Pauline Kael” (included in Menand’s essay collection American Studies, 2002), lists a number of movies that Kael cherished (e.g., Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game, Shoeshine), and says:

The technical term for the quality many of these movies … share is “open form.” The camera directs its gaze with equal empathy at every facet of the world viewed. Ordinary things are not scanted or rushed over, since the gods, if there are any, are probably in the details; but grand things are not put into quotation marks, or set up to be knocked down, either, since great emotions are as much a part of life as anything else. The door is opened onto the world “as it is,” without scrims or stage directions; and the world is left at the end, in the same condition, unarranged, and unboxed by moral resolution.

Craig Seligman, in his Sontag & Kael (2004), notes that Kael’s “dislike of being told how to respond was a constant in her criticism, and this was her principal objection to Shoah.” In support of his point, Seligman quotes the following passage from Kael’s great essay “Raising Kane” (The New Yorker, February 20 & 27, 1971; included in Kael, Mankiewicz and Welles’ The Citizen Kane Book, 1971):

In the thirties, Jean Renoir had been using deep focus (that is, keeping the middle range and the background as clear as the foreground) in a naturalistic way. The light seemed (and often was) “natural.” You looked at a scene, and the drama that you saw going on in it was just part of that scene, and so you had the sense of discovering it for yourself, of seeing drama in the midst of life. This was a tremendous relief from the usual studio lighting, which forced your attention to the dramatic action in the frame, blurred the rest, and rarely gave you a chance to feel that the action was part of anything larger or anything continuous.

Seligman also quotes from Kael’s reviews of Harlan County, U.S.A., and Comfort and Joy. But neither Menand nor Seligman mention what I think is Kael’s clearest statement of her “open form” preference. I’m referring to the following passage in her magnificent review of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (see “Alchemy,” The New Yorker, March 18, 1972; collected in Kael’s Deeper Into Movies, 1973, and For Keeps, 1994):

The period details are there – a satin pillow, a modernistic apartment-house lobby, a child’s pasted-together greeting to Grandpa – but Coppola doesn’t turn the viewer into a guided tourist, told what to see. Nor does he go for a lot of closeups, which are the simplest tool for fixing a director’s attitude. Diane Keaton (who plays Michael’s girl friend) is seen casually; her attractiveness isn’t labored. The only character who is held in frame for us to see exactly as the character looking at her sees her is Apollonia (played by Simonetta Stefanelli), whom Michael falls in love with in Sicily. She is fixed by the camera as a ripe erotic image, because that is what she means to him, and Coppola, not having wasted his resources, can do it in a few frames. In general, he tries not to fix the images. In Sunday Bloody Sunday, John Schlesinger showed a messy knocked-over ashtray being picked up in closeup, so that there was nothing to perceive in the shot but the significance of the messiness. Coppola, I think, would have kept the camera on the room in which the woman bent over to retrieve the ashtray, and the messiness would have been just one element among many to be observed – perhaps the curve of her body could have told us much more than the actual picking-up motion. The Godfather keeps so much in front of us all the time that we’re never bored (though the picture runs just two minutes short of three hours) – we keep taking things in. This is a heritage from Jean Renoir – this uncoercive, “open” approach to the movie frame. Like Renoir, Coppola lets the spectator roam around in the images, lets a movie breathe, and this is extremely difficult in a period film, in which every detail must be carefully planted. But the details never look planted: you’re a few minutes into the movie before you’re fully conscious that it’s set in the past.

As an approach to movie-making, I can’t see how “open form” can be improved on. Yet, even today, we see directors constantly forcing our attention to the dramatic action in the frame, always telling us what we should be feeling, seeing, and thinking.

Credit: The above portrait of Pauline Kael is by Edward Sorel; it appears in The New Yorker (October 20, 2003) as an illustration for David Denby’s “My Life As A Paulette.”