A dispatch from our Art Editor on the art and illustrations in the Review’s December 19 issue.
The last art newsletter of 2024, covering the art and illustrations from our Holiday Issue, comes from a small cabin upstate, where I retreated to work on my book after closing the issue and spending Thanksgiving with friends.
The Holiday Issue is one of four each year for which we commission a hand-drawn and -lettered cover. I wrote to the New York–based illustrator, cook, and author Tamara Shopsin to see if she’d do this one. As a fan of her strong, wry work—in particular the Valentine-themed series art she made for us last February—I’d wanted to ask her to design a cover for a while. She sent a handful of graphic, wintry sketches, then at the last minute sent an idea for a play on the term “snowmobile.” The Calderesque shapes were the perfect pedestal for the issue’s cover lines.
The issue opens with a roiling Bruegel painting, The Wedding Dance (1566), which accompanies Susan Tallman’s review of Svetlana Alpers’s book about the discipline of art history; and in a similarly classical vein, we pulled a David Levine drawing from the magazine’s archives to illustrate Jenny Uglow’s essay on Handel’s Messiah. For Regina Marler on Richard Powers, I asked Georgie McAusland for a portrait. She gave us a stylized likeness and stuck a chess piece in Powers’s breast pocket.
Mickalene Thomas’s energetic How Can I Make Sweet Love to You (If You Won’t Stand Still) (2007) opens Carolina Miranda’s review of Thomas’s solo exhibition, currently at the Broad in Los Angeles and traveling to London and Toulouse next year. John Brooks made a double portrait of the poets Maureen N. McLane and Terrance Hayes for Ange Mlinko’s review of their recent prose collections.
Sophia Martineck, who illustrated last year’s Holiday Issue cover, gave us a drawing of Shakespeare between thresholds for Alexander Leggatt’s essay about second chances in the bard’s work: the possibility of redemption and the tragedy of willfulness for characters like Olivia, Lear, Othello, and Prince Hal. I turned to Rachel Levit Ruiz’s back catalog to find something for David Cole’s essay on the Supreme Court’s forthcoming ruling on a Tennessee law that denies gender-affirming care for minors. If I had my druthers her patterned painting would be one of the prints that appear on hospital gowns and scrubs.
I’ve long admired the work of the London-based illustrator George Wylesol, and finally got to commission him for Joanna Biggs’s review of Eliza Barry Callahan’s first novel, The Hearing Test. He sent a handful of sketches, and we landed on a simple composition centered on Callahan’s profile. I look forward to working with Wylesol again. For Ian Tattersall on the historic transition from nonverbal to verbal language for Homo sapiens, the Toronto-based ink maker and artist Jason Logan sent some luscious, colorful word bubbles.
I asked the Parisian Fanny Blanc to illustrate Francesca Wade’s review of Holly A. Baggett’s Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap and The Little Review. She sent a wonderful drawing depicting the queer couple in the magazine’s office in 1916. For Robert Kuttner on economic globalization, Paul Sahre brilliantly portrayed free trade as a football diagram. Jason De León won a National Book Award for Soldiers and Kings, his book about human smuggling and the American border, and it was nice to compare the portrait of him that Lorenzo Gritti made for John Washington’s review to the photos of De León that accompanied articles about his award.
I loved Frances Wilson’s piece on Iris Murdoch, which opens by describing her face and her inscrutable beauty. The Montreal-based illustrator Alain Pilon recently started making portraits, and I thought his style would convey the sense of Murdoch’s unusual attraction. Sure enough, the charm in Pilon’s drawing is there, but elusive.
The ink-blotty series art in the issue, titled “we come as friends,” is by the Berlin-based artist Andrea Ventura.
I’d like to add a note of gratitude to a group of artists who joined me for an event that the Review cosponsored with New York City’s French bookstore, Villa Albertine, on their tenth anniversary. Tamara Shopsin, Paul Sahre, Joana Avillez, Tom Bachtell, Jason Fulford, and Nicholas Blechman bravely stepped outside the privacy of their drawing tables and studios and, onstage with Sharpies in front of dozens of New Yorkers, drew erotic scenes from French literature.
Happy holidays to these and all the artists and galleries I work with, whom I appreciate not only for their talent but for their trust, energy, and good humor.
