ALIAZON REVISTAS: A Summer Cornucopia

A dispatch from our Art Editor, Leanne Shapton ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

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A dispatch from our Art Editor, Leanne Shapton, on the art and illustrations in the Review’s August 21 issue.

The thirty-fifth art newsletter covers the art and illustrations in The New York Review’s annual Summer Issue. It’s brought to you alongside goldenberries, tomatoes, fennel, and more from a farm stand I frequent on the North Fork of Long Island.

I asked the cartoonist and writer Liana Finck to design the cover. Liana usually works in black ink, with just a little bit of color, so filling our bright broadsheet space was a little new for her. She sent some ideas, and my favorite was a living room where a family was inundated with threats of doom.

I suggested to Finck that she move the domestic scene outside, given the season, and she replaced the coffee table with a toxic waste–filled wading pool. Other perils include fire, war, disease, and $90 flip-flops. One editor described it as “a summer hellscape” and Finck titled the finished piece Why can’t you just relax?

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In the first article in the issue, Alma Guillermoprieto writes about Joeseph Pilates and his disciples. I asked James McMullan, a master of figure study, for a portrait, and he turned in a bright illustration of the famously topless fitness guru with the dancer Romana Kryzanowska, his former student (and the woman who established the Pilates legacy), in the background.

It makes me happy when an illustrator is a fan of their subject, so I was glad when Yann Kebbi enthusiastically agreed to draw Jamaica Kincaid for Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s essay about her novels, stories, and place in African American literature. Kebbi’s drawing, like Kincaid’s voice, in Gates’s words, is “mordant, irreverent, unremitting, and generous.”

For David Cole’s essay on the conservative justices’ willingness to bend their own rules during the most recent Supreme Court term, we approved Paul Sahre’s sketch of a judge making an umpire’s call. Unable to find the right reference for his final design, Sahre ordered a judge’s robe online and modeled himself in an umpire’s posture. (Knowing he now has this prop might come in handy for future commissions.)

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I thought of the illustrator Carly Blumenthal’s colored-pencil portraits when I read Sue Halpern’s review of Laila Lalami’s new novel, The Dream Hotel. After being encouraged to make her first sketch more ominous, Blumenthal delivered a steely Lalami set against images of surveillance.

Chloë Clifton-Wright’s essay about the playwright Harauld Hughes was a conundrum since neither of them exist. But fortunately Dean Rogers had photographed the British writer, actor, and director Richard Ayoade in 2022 in character as the misunderstood Hughes, so we used one of the pictures—set in 1982—from that session.

I saw a moving Cy Gavin show at Gagosian in 2022, and loved his paintings of weirs, waves, and rhododendrons. When I looked up more of his work, I discovered canvases of skies, binary stars, and comets. We paired his 2024 painting of a meteor with Sean M. Carroll’s essay about the Big Bang and the state of contemporary cosmology.

The Berlin-based Italian painter Andrea Ventura made a portrait of Chaim Grade for Daphne Merkin’s review of his recently translated book, Sons and Daughters. Ventura usually sets his figures against plain backgrounds, but for this essay about a Yiddish-language novelist who wrote about the lost world of European shtetls, Ventura’s background included an old European cityscape and a figure in a tallit.

Fittingly, given the cornucopia in this newsletter’s art, the series art in the Summer Issue is by Andrew Tarlow, who also happens to own Borgo, a restaurant located a few blocks from the Review’s offices in Manhattan. I had been to many of his restaurants but didn’t know he was also a painter until our editor in chief told me. When we met Tarlow at Borgo, I asked him, over chicken Milanese, if he’d consider drawing some series art. A couple weeks later he’d sent an entire sketchbook of drawings for us to consider.

—Leanne Shapton