 Sponsored by Little Bear Ridge Road  A dispatch from our Art Editor, Leanne Shapton, on the art and illustrations in the Review’s November 6, November 20, and December 4 issues. Newsletter thirty-eight comes after I made a brief visit to Toronto, where I attended a House of Anansi Press board meeting and stayed with my brother. The Toronto Blue Jays were playing the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series, and like the rest of the city, my brother and I were watching. After he opened a bag of potato chips and poured a glass of wine, I picked up the bag and marveled that the chips were Marmite flavored. I ate one; there was nothing Marmite-like about it, so I looked at the package again. I realized “Cuites à la Marmite” was a translation of “Kettle Cooked.” My brain flooded with memories of the bilingual package designs of my Canadian childhood. French classes were mandatory until ninth grade, but I credit what basic French I retain to the bilingual signage and wrappers that surrounded me growing up. I still think “paté dentifrice” before “toothpaste” and see “sirop” when I hear “syrup.”  The best packaging, to my eye, is the yellow-and-black designs for the generic, no-name (non nom) products at the No Frills discount supermarkets, owned by the Loblaw company. Their products are branded simply and graphically in Futura extra bold on a lemon-yellow ground. It’s a giant storewide vocabulary lesson. I asked my brother to take me to the nearest No Frills so I could paint the packages.  The cover of the November 6 issue, Untitled (Human heart), is by the artist Cy Gavin, and we picked it to echo Ben Lerner’s essay about his open-heart surgery. (Inside the issue, Lerner’s memoiristic thoughts about mortality and writing were paired with a diptych of Jason Fulford photographs of hospital oddments.) For two articles on the state of criticism (by Jed Perl, on a critic’s power, and Matthew Aucoin, on music criticism), I asked George Wylesol for a pair of rhyming illustrations. He delivered two quiet, unusual scenes of spectators encountering artwork.  Advertisement I knew Fulford had photographed medical environments, so after reading Lerner’s essay, I asked him to send me a selection. He sent more than twenty, each in his signature deadpan-absurdist-documentary style, from green scrubs to anatomical models. We picked some institutional sheeting and a wall of diagnostic instruments. On a visit to Paris, the illustrator and writer Maira Kalman went to the show “Alfred Dreyfus: Vérité et justice” at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme. She was inspired to paint a scene of Dreyfus in his cell on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana, where he was imprisoned for over four years. I’m hopeful this could be the first in a series of paintings inspired by exhibitions.  After reading Peter E. Gordon’s review of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s latest book, Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science, I thought of some Katherine Bradford pieces I’d seen on a recent visit to Canada Gallery, in Tribeca. Looking through her older work, I found a wonderful painting titled, appropriately, Law Makers (2021), which went perfectly with Gordon’s discussion of Appiah’s thoughts on ritual and sociology. Bradford’s show is up at Canada Gallery until December 13. Wyatt Mason writes about eight collections of Guy Davenport’s letters and essays in a beautiful tribute to the late critic. Davenport was born in South Carolina but lived and died in Lexington, Kentucky, and I wanted a fellow southerner to make his portrait. I thought of the artist and Kentuckian John Brooks, who is also a fan of Davenport’s. He gave us a lovely drawing of the bespectacled writer. For Francine Prose’s review of the first English translation of Adam and Eve in Paradise, by the nineteenth-century poet and writer Eça de Queirós, I looked up work by the Spanish painter and illustrator Jesús Cisneros. He had done a number of scenes of plants and animals, and a few of a paradisal garden. We chose In the garden, from 2020.  When I was a judge for the Booker Prize in 2018, I flew to London every month, and I found relatively cheap, regular lodging at the Royal Society of Medicine in Marylebone. On my way to my room, I’d pass an enormous painting on the main staircase, Alexander I, Emperor of Russia (1820), by James Northcote, which depicts Alexander I on horseback, rescuing a peasant who appears to have drowned. After I read Nitin K. Ahuja’s piece about the “gray zone” between life and death, I remembered the painting, which has since been removed from the Royal Society and is now up for auction at Christie’s (estimate: £10,000–£15,000). The painting’s plaque reads: “H.I.M. Alexander, Emperor of all the Russias: The Emperor, seeing the apparently lifeless body of a peasant which had been dragged from the River Wilna, dismounted from his horse, and after more than three hours’ constant personal efforts, succeeded in restoring the man to life. For this Act the Gold Medal of the Royal Humane Society was rewarded to H.I.M. in 1806.” Alexander I, Emperor of Russia also makes an appearance in a short story of mine, published last year in The Yale Review. Also in the November 6 issue, Hillary Kelly considers the novelist and short story writer Tessa Hadley. I hoped Adrian Tomine might make a good portrait, despite the fact that he’s often been unavailable recently, busy as he is drawing New Yorker covers and making a film adaptation of his comic Shortcomings. To my surprise, he said yes and delivered a striking profile portrait of the British writer. Darryl Pinckney reviewed Nicholas Boggs’s new biography of James Baldwin, and we chose a bright Beauford Delaney portrait from 1965 to go with it. It was initially hard to track down permissions to reprint the painting, so I wrote to Boggs for help, running the risk that he might suspect we were covering his book. He came through with a contact for Delaney’s estate, and I was relieved he didn’t ask any questions.  The series art for the issue, Danse de tilleul (Linden Dance) (2025), is by Bénédicte Thoraval.  The cover of the November 20 issue is by the Japanese painter Hiroki Kawanabe, whose work we’ve run alongside several essays in the past. His painting After the Rain (2025) was perfect for late autumn’s wet and chilly weather.  It’s always helpful when our artists and illustrators are close readers of the Review, or fans of our contributors. The British illustrator Paul Davis has told me a number of times how much he admires Fintan O’Toole—his own irate, irreverent style seems to match O’Toole’s voice—so I often try to pair the two. Davis’s deadpan dying donkey was a nice fit with O’Toole’s review of Kamala Harris’s campaign memoir, 107 Days.  Advertisement  Carly Blumenthal’s drawing of Kate Riley, for Joanna Biggs’s review of Riley’s recent novel Ruth, incorporated elements from Biggs’s trenchant description of the novel’s setting: “the sort of MAHA paradise that Americans love to dream about right now, where yogurt is made from scratch, women treasure their floral dresses, and children play with newts rather than watch screens.” Looking for images and ideas for Anne Diebel’s essay about fertility and freezing eggs, I turned to the artist Emma Kohlmann. One of her watercolors, of a moonlike face overlayed with a female figure, suggested the lunar cycle and dreams, two big aspects of the reproductive journey. For Linda Kinstler’s review of two books about nation-states and sovereignty, the designer Paul Sahre sent a sketch of state-shaped holes in the ground, but upon making the final art he complained that “every defunct country looks like a hole in the ground!” I had to agree, but I still liked the way it looked. He solved our problem by numbering and labeling the holes.  The series art in the issue, Stones and Shells (2025), is by Céline Aziza Kaldas Anderson.  The cover of our December 4 issue, Anemone Flowered Japanese Chrysanthemum’s (2025), is by the French illustrator Jochen Gerner. Gerner drew some of the Review’s very first series art after our redesign in 2022, and he has illustrated or provided art for a number of essays over the past three years. I’ve tried a few times to get his work on the cover, so I was very happy when the editors agreed on this piece.  The designer and art director Kelly Blair gave us a graphic play on webs and clicks for James Gleick’s essay about the decay of the World Wide Web and Internet culture. I recently read some of Vigdis Hjorth’s novels and became a huge fan (and I was over budget for my illustration quota), so I was happy to pinch-hit and painted the Norwegian writer myself for Ursula Lindsey’s review of three of her books. Michael Gorra reviews Susan Cheever’s latest memoir, When All the Men Wore Hats: Susan Cheever on the Stories of John Cheever, and I asked the Berlin-born, Paris-based illustrator Simone Goder for a double portrait of father and daughter Cheever. For Susan Neiman’s review of David Rieff’s book Desire and Fate, the designer Matt Dorfman took the idea of “woke” literally, submitting us sketches of eyes, open and shut. We chose one venetian-blinded version, alternating open and shut in the colors of the American flag.  I read Adam Kirsch’s review of Self-Portrait in the Studio by Giorgio Agamben and thought that Agamben’s fellow Italian Andrea Ventura might make a good portrait. Little did I know, Ventura was in Rome, and a friend of his happened to be having lunch with Agamben the next day. He got his friend to take a picture of Agamben to use as reference. Andrea sent the photo, then two wonderful drawings. I think this sets a record for most freshly executed portrait. For Anthony Domestico’s review of a biography of the poet Amy Clampitt, Georgie McAusland offered us a choice of backdrops, either Unicorn Tapestry–esque flowers or foggy Maine coast. We went with the coast, and McAusland delivered a deeply haunting likeness. The issue concludes with Zephyr Teachout’s review of two books about multilevel marketing schemes and consumer and workplace policy. I asked the Antwerp-based Fien Jorissen to illustrate it. She explained her sketch thus: “I tried to represent the pyramid structure with the schemes through multiple panels, focusing on subtle gestures and the sense of tragedy within the system. I also wanted to explore a way to go beyond just depicting multilevel marketing, using the hang-gliding figure as a kind of meta-narrator, reflecting on the system itself, where the pyramid becomes part of the landscape and the sun takes the form of a dollar.” Thoughtful work.  The series art in the issue, Connectivity (2025), is by Lucy Yu, who keeps an impressive sketchbook while simultaneously owning and operating the wonderful Chinatown bookstore Yu & Me Books, described as New York’s first queer Asian American bookstore/bar/café. —Leanne Shapton  Advertisement   You are receiving this message because you signed up Update your address or preferencesView this newsletter onlineThe New York Review of Books |
jueves, 20 de noviembre de 2025
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