This newsletter comes to you while I’m watching Thunder on the Hill, part of the “Douglas Sirk Noir” series currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. A convicted murderer, bickering nurses and nuns, a risky childbirth, a sadistic composer, and a flood all feature in this appealingly gloomy 1951 movie. I like painting black and white film stills, so Sirk’s high-contrast drama was excellent material.
The cover for the magazine’s March 13 issue features a 2018 painting by the Canadian artist Kim Dorland. I was looking for something that might reference the themes of fires, imperialism, and reflection that thread through the issue’s editorial lineup, and after several rounds of discussion and debate we landed on a figure standing before the Northern Lights. Inside, after two long-lost Caravaggio paintings illustrating Ingrid Rowland’s essay about the Renaissance great, a painting of palm trees foregrounding a fiery sky—by the Ithaca, New York–based painter Leslie Brack—opens Martin Filler’s article about the devastation wrought by the wildfires in Los Angeles this January.
James Walton reviews Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel, Caledonian Road, for which the Brazil-born illustrator Laura Lannes made a handsome seated portrait. For an essay by Celia Paul about self-portraiture, excerpted from her new book, Celia Paul: Works, we chose a watercolor study she made of herself at age twenty-three and a painting of the BT Tower as seen from her London apartment.
Maya Chessman drew a somber Anthony Hecht for Mark Ford’s review of the poet’s collected work alongside a new biography. The series art in the issue is by designer and illustrator Mike McQuade, who I met through Corin Hewitt, another series contributor.
In my three years at the Review, I haven’t featured the same artist more than once on the cover. I broke that streak for the March 27 issue after I read Sally Rooney’s wonderful essay about the snooker champion Ronnie O’ Sullivan. The Dutch artist Sigrid Calon, whose work last appeared on our January 19, 2023, cover, makes graphic pattens and compositions, which felt like an appropriate abstraction of a ball’s trajectory on a billiards baize.
For Laura Marsh on the state of attention and distraction, I thought of Fien Jorissen’s multipaneled work. She was available and turned around a detailed and exploded single-panel piece. She explained that she “wanted to create a busy illustration with fragmented pieces that show the mind in a distracted world. However, by using a single-panel illustration as a background, I tried to maintain clarity.” In an unintentional contrast with Jorissen’s figure at a desk, George Wylesolgave us a glowing oculus in place of a computer to illustrate Ben Tarnoff’s essay on the history of artificial intelligence.
Yann Kebbi seemed like the right person to ask for a portrait of Ronald Reagan, and his ballpoint-pen rendering suited Jacob Weisberg’s review of Max Boot’s biography of the former president. As Kebbi wrote to me, “It has a weirdness, but I like it.” The Berlin-based illustrator Laura Breiling manages to gracefully layer a lot of information into her illustrations, so when I read Catherine Nicholson’s essay about the many lives of Milton’s Paradise Lost, I wondered what Breiling might do with it. Her Milton, she explained, is “made of marble with a few fractures, which symbolize his crumbling godlike image.” She sent two final drafts to choose between, either a blond or a brunette Milton, and I picked the blond.
Oliver Munday made a bright illustration of a syringe for David Oshinsky’s essay on RNA, DNA, and vaccines, and Grant Shaffer painted a pensive Ford Madox Ford in a palette-like composition for Michael Dirda’s review of Max Saunders’s new biography of the early-twentieth-century English novelist.
Our editor in chief, Emily Greenhouse, suggested a Jacqueline de Jong painting for Rooney’s essay on snooker. Assistant editor Sam Needleman had written about De Jong and her billiards paintings for the NYR Online in April 2024, and we found a few pieces that seemed a perfect fit. We went with Gitane, coup de force, from 1978. Alette Fleischer at the Jacqueline de Jong Foundation, who helped us secure the image, wrote to tell us that “Ronnie O’Sullivan is my favorite snooker player!”
The series art in the issue, What Remains, is by Natàlia Pàmies, a young illustrator based in Barcelona and Toronto, whose work I was introduced to by the Canadian writer Sheila Heti.
I look up Douglas Sirk when the movie ends and read about his life before he moved to the United States. A leftist artist in Nazi Germany, he divorced his first wife, who joined the Nazi Party and, after Sirk married Hilde Jary, a Jewish actress, his first wife legally barred him from ever seeing his only child. After Sirk and Jary fled Germany in 1937, his son was conscripted into the German army and killed, age eighteen, on the eastern front in 1944. Thunder on the Hill concludes with the wrongfully accused woman exonerated, the baby’s health renewed, and the rains letting up. A typical Hollywood ending, but a relief, nonetheless.
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