A Midwinter Swim

Some mornings, after I’ve dropped my daughter off at school, I swim laps at my local YMCA. I do about a mile, enough to get my heart rate up, to ruminate on all the big and little concerns, to stretch my limbs and lungs and hamstrings, and, when I’m kicking with a kickboard, to look at the other swimmers. Most of them are elderly Chinese women; most of them wear pink swim caps, which I find cheering. This art newsletter comes post-swim, midwinter.

The painting on the cover of our February 13 issue, Danseurs du crépuscule (2018), is from a series by the French artist Didier Viodé. I’d seen Viodé’s work on the online art platform “It’s Nice That” a few years ago—his athletes, figures, portraits, and self-portraits are unusually vigorous—and I was inspired to look him up again after reading Blair McClendon’s essay about the wondrous Alvin Ailey show at the Whitney. To my delight, Viodé had a number of watercolors of Black dancers. We chose a particularly energetic one.

The Netherlands-based illustrator Hanneke Rozemuller—whose wonderful, trippy drawings remind me of the work of Push Pin Studios, Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast’s design collective that once occupied our office building—made a portrait of Colm Tóibín for Giles Harvey’s review of Tóibín’s latest novel, Long Island.

Jessica Riskin’s essay on determinism immediately made me think of Jochen Gerner, whose work often seems to be “thinking aloud.” He made an attractive diagram of a wind-up free-will toy. For Nicole Flattery’s review of Halle Butler’s novel The House of Self-Worth, I asked Leah Reena Goren, not realizing that she lived in fire-ravaged Altadena, Los Angeles. To my surprise, she took the assignment, despite having evacuated her home. I offered her an extension on the usual deadline, but, professional as ever, she delivered a portrait of Butler with houseplant, on time.

I met the artist Andrea Ventura for coffee and asked him to paint Charles de Gaulle for Robert O. Paxton’s review of de Gaulle’s memoirs. He gave us a distinguished DeGaulle en kepi.

Anna Higgie drew a beautiful group portrait of Boris Chicherin, Vasily Maklakov, Pavel Novgorodtsev, Timofei Granovsky, and Pavel Miliukov for Gary Saul Morson’s essay about the history of Russian liberalism. Jason Kernevitch, who is part of the design firm The Heads of State, drew a demented economist for Caitlin Zaloom’s essay about the sometimes inefficient or nonsensical policies that economic thinking can produce.

The series art in the issue was done by the artist Margaux Williamson, who was in town for a show of her work at James Cohan Gallery. 

Our February 27 issue featured the painting Man (2020), by the German artist Friedemann Heckel, on the cover. We met to talk about the cover a few days after President Trump’s inauguration, and the subject—a dejected, rumpled man on a train, backdropped by a bleak landscape—seemed appropriate to the moment. I’d seen Heckel’s work one rainy afternoon in January, at Galerie Thomas Fischer in Berlin, and he just closed a show at Schwartzman& in Chelsea.

After reading James Gleick on time and futurology, I remembered Jason Fulford’s 2013 photobook, Hotel Oracle, about the future of the cosmos. I sent Fulford a draft of Gleick’s essay and he e-mailed back, “I like this piece,” and sent a link to fifty-seven photos. We narrowed them down to four. Fulford’s new book, Lots of Lots, is out now from MACK Books.

Gaby Wood, a journalist, printmaker, and the literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, made another etching for us, this time of Diana Athill, for Vivian Gornick’s review of Athill’s 1962 book Instead of a Letter. Gaby made a number of different versions, and we settled on one of Athill sitting in a green armchair, inspired by the composition of a painting Vanessa Bell did of her sister, Virginia Woolf. Wood wrote: “I struggled with the likeness in this portrait. It was interesting to think about the features that made Athill recognizable but after a while I went for character—stately demeanor, amused expression—over exactitude.” Paul Sahre gave us more green for Fred Kaplan’s essay about Silicon Valley’s work in the military industry, refiguring the classic plastic army figurine as an iPad-holding, takeout-coffee-gripping tech worker.

I asked Simone Goder for a portrait of Charles Baxter for Sigrid Nunez’s review of his new novel, Blood Test. Alain Pilon drew a tousled, bespectacled Markus Werner for Michael Hofmann’s essay about the disheveled Swiss writer’s recently reissued novel The Frog in the Throat. The artist and illustrator Carly Blumenthal had e-mailed me last fall with examples of her delicate work. A chance to commission her came up with Irina Dumitrescu’s essay about the Albanian writer Lea Ypi and her memoir about growing up under communism, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History.

With only one authenticated photograph of the poet Emily Dickinson in existence, I knew Hugo Guinness could make a striking portrait based on this minimal reference material. His woodcut is just off enough to reanimate our collective image of the poet, for Christopher Benfey’s essay about The Letters of Emily Dickinson.

I found a drawing by the artist and jeweler Kaye Blegvad for Anna Louie Sussman’s essay about the state of contemporary sex. I thought Blegvad’s dichromatic bed, accessorized by loose chains, contained at least three or four metaphors for sexual intimacy and its future.

In what I hope might become a recurring feature of graphic conversations, the cartoonists Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco contributed an original comic, “Never Again and Again,” “drawing themselves into the Gaza Strip.” The pair turned in their pages just before the ceasefire was announced, and in response they quickly adjusted the panels.

The series art in this issue is by Laura Lannes.

When I get out of the pool on these freezing mornings, I shower and put my clothes on beside the mostly Chinese-speaking strangers. I wonder, with some dread, how our worlds might collide and change, randomly and suddenly, at any given moment or executive order.