Little Murders
Thirty years ago, editorial illustration in our mainstream media was provocative and smart, driving the words as often as following them. Today much of it is literal and safe, more decorative than idea-driven. How did this happen in an age where image is everything?
When Howell Raines quit The New York Times, Jerelle Kraus publicly called him Caligula, because he chopped off people’s heads before they got to speak. Now she is telling me how Raines saw penises everywhere, in the most innocent, ridiculous places, making her job as op-ed art director difficult. “Nobody else would see it, but he would see it,” she tells me, “and then I’d have to change it.” What she remembers is a pencil. A Janusz Kapusta illustration of a round-erasered pencil, signing a peace treaty, which she had to square off, in 1993, because of Caligula. “Get it?” she says. “A round-erasered pencil?” I got it.
It was hard enough defending imagery that confronted religion or politics or race; to be on the lookout for accidental phalli was just another reminder of how far op-ed had fallen. Kraus knew better than anyone. No other art director had lasted more than roughly two years but she lasted thirteen years all told, 1979 to 1989 and 1993 to 1996, each year, in her view, more watered down than the last.
She was an artists’ advocate up until the day Raines dropped her from op-ed in 1996. But you don’t understand, Kraus would sometimes say, ugly is beautiful. Once an illustrator was on the other side of a doorway and he heard her fight for his piece, and he said to her, My God, I have never heard someone defend my work like that. How could Kraus tell an editor in the ’90s that in the ’70s and ’80s ugly had been permissible on op-ed? Or that back then, editors actually believed artists inspired them?
Kraus is now art director of the Weekend sections and the Arts & Ideas section, a job she was happy to take. And op-ed is some other thing. When she looks at it, she can’t help thinking rather morosely that her career maps out the decline. “I was able to do my job for a long time,” she says. “I wanted metaphors. I wanted ideas. If the image repeats the words why run the story? The page has completely deteriorated, in terms of drawing. Things change, the world changes, but I get so many calls from artists who complain about how bad the art is, bad draftsmanship, pieces that don’t have any substance.”
A number of top illustrators told me the same thing: All the heavy thinkers are gone. All the big ideas diminished. Not just pencils but anything requiring the slightest abstraction of thought. Not just at the Times, they said, but all over the place; it was endemic. Opinion art was reduced to display. Cheap irony prevailed. A generation of artists had internalized the new parameters of the offense-o-meter. As Christoph Niemann, a frequent Times contributor, put it: “When I work for the Times on a constant basis, I don’t even suggest certain ideas any more. Of course, you want to get your image printed.”
It was funny, in a sense, to hear censorship complaints from a field that had all but been pronounced dead in the first place. Illustration has supposedly been killed off three times over the years, by photography, by television, and most recently by the computer. Illustrators survive on ten-year-old pay rates. I fought the feeling that these artists were irrelevant. But there is something timeless about pairing images with words, they told me, and they believe in it.
They also know that time to fight back is running out, which is why in 1999 they convened the first Illustration Conference. It was one thing to confront a new technology, like television; you could react to that, create alternative images. It was enough to worry about how huge caches of homogenous imagery were available to editors cheap over the Internet. But to worry about editors simply not getting it anymore, or being afraid to get it, to worry about the distinct possibility that their own art was considered offensive to the masses, that was dangerous. Some kind of shift had taken place. And so every other year they get together now, and discuss how best to continue doing work that matters.
In 1999 hundreds of illustrators convened in Santa Fe. That year the talk was of staying competitive in a changing marketplace: of avoiding unfair labor contracts that transferred ownership of an image to a newspaper or magazine into perpetuity; of integrating digital techniques into workmanship; of diversifying into children’s books or animation. By last summer, at the third Illustration Conference, in Philadelphia, there was an undercurrent of fear. In a panel moderated by Steven Guarnaccia, The New York Times op-ed art director and a respected illustrator in his own right, some of the industry’s more socially conscious editorial illustrators discussed the difficulties of getting artist-driven ideas published. It’s one thing for artists to complain, but another thing entirely for an art director at our paper of record to share frustrations. Guarnaccia, choosing his words carefully, was one of the more vocal critics.
“As often as I can,” he said, “I bring up artist-driven ideas. And unfortunately, they come in a trickle these days, partly because we’ve gotten a reputation for being timid for what we put on the page. Or I will push for a drawing that expresses a stronger idea than just the idea that’s already in the piece. And the editors will love it, roll their eyes and say, ‘We can never print that.’”
In October I started asking artists for their rejects, the kind of material that they couldn’t seem to sell any more, or that had been substantially altered for publication. The examples came in slowly, huge JPEG files that ate up my e-mail space, and anecdotes from artists calling out certain publications for messing with their art. The Wall Street Journal for telling an illustrator he could draw a dead lobster for a food column, but he couldn’t put the same dead lobster in a tank of hot water. Business Week for lobbying to make a pirate figure in an illustration female, although in the history of pirating females are very hard to find. Rolling Stone for asking an artist to remove a Gap reference in a Bill and Monica send-up.
When it comes to rejection stories I have an innate distrust of artists, especially illustrators. It is a unique form of torture, having one’s ideas adjusted to fit someone else’s imperative, and it can’t help but breed cynicism. Artists can miss the mark. There is also the matter of individual taste — not all rejected art points to malfeasance — and the neurotic vigilance inherent in all good editors.
That said, by the time I was done collecting I had a backpack full of JPEG printouts — sketches and finished pieces turned down or edited for being too dark or too demanding, too offensive, too political, too sexual — and cumulatively they seemed to suggest something, an encroachment, a shift toward timidity, or perhaps, although I was skeptical, a loss. (For how do you prove loss? It’s next to impossible. Is garbage culture loss? Celebrity-driven photography? Are we worse off for these things?) Maybe these artists, in the big scheme of things, were ghosts. But their rejected images were clues: you could look at them and see evidence, of fantasy and metaphor being stripped away, of banality stuffed down your throat. Indifference and redundancy infect so much of our news now, produced as it is by corporate empires whose passion is profit. Here was a symptom of the demise — the rejected images, the ridiculousness of their fate in full display, and as a unit they cast a flicker of light on a dulled-out moonscape left behind by this plague of blandness.
Most editorial illustrators work by commission, but in the fall of 2000, in the midst of a seemingly endless election quagmire in Florida, Ward Sutton got a jump on his competition. The author of the syndicated weekly Sutton Impact cartoon strip pitched an idea to the op-ed page at The New York Times, for a double portrait of the eventual winner, one face looking upward toward a rosy sky, the other looking down, morosely into shadowland, as if to say, yes, I am the victor, but was it really worth it?
The figures were fairly wooden save for two beads of sweat, expressing, said Sutton, “anxiety,” on the forehead of the downcast face. Bush won. The Times accepted the illustration. It ran December 14, above a column by Richard Brookhiser touting the doggedness that came from “having been a frat boy Republican in the alien environment of late 1960s Yale.” It ran, however, without the beads of sweat.
Because the thought of people putting their heads together to decide what to do about sweat seemed simultaneously amusing and significant, I called then-op-ed editor Terry Tang and asked her about it. Most editors are not inclined to discuss such things but she obliged. “The piece was about the ease with which Bush would surprise people who underestimated him,” she said. “It wasn’t about Bush sweating bullets.”
“It ran as an illustration,” she continued. “As art that accompanies what is primary, the opinion piece” — a response that implied a kind of literalism that, again, seemed simultaneously amusing and significant.
In the early days of the Times op-ed page, it is hard to imagine two beads of sweat causing this much hand-wringing. Created in 1970, the page was the first of its kind, a symbiosis of word and image where neither was subservient, where artists were encouraged to portray the essence of a text as opposed to literal interpretations, where their ideas were as essential as a writer’s ideas. The result was opinioned, provocative art, often dark and unsettling, from upstarts like Brad Holland, Roland Topor, and Eugene Mihaesco that today in its audacity seems staggering. For the first anniversary of the Attica prison uprising Brad Holland drew the body of a black man with one arm cut off at the elbow, and in the darkness of night, above the ground where he lay dead, the amputated forearm rose to a clenched fist, the severed fist of black power. Robert Pryor sketched Nixon with a nose that drooped down into the shape of Vietnam. Roland Topor depicted unemployed people as armless supplicants waiting patiently in line for new arms, which lay piled up on a desk. The images underscored the role of op-ed art as articulated by Harrison Salisbury, the first editor of the page. “Art is not employed on op-ed to ‘illustrate,’ to give the reader a picture of the scene the writer is trying to describe,” Salisbury wrote in the introduction to The Indignant Years, a collection of art and articles from op-ed in the early ’70s. “No. The task of op-ed’s images is to create an environment which extends and deepens the impact of the word; to provide an ambiance in which the writer may more intensively penetrate his reader’s mind.”
Over time, the word won out on the Times op-ed page, until today it is a rare instance when you need to read a piece to interpret the art conjoined with it. The art itself tends towards ha-ha irony while caricature and direct representation of ideas, as opposed to icon, are discouraged. Editors seem out of touch with the tradition of the page (“I can’t give you the history of what art on the op-ed page was like when I wasn’t there, obviously,” Terry Tang told me). This is not to say that good art never appears, for it does; yet in general art is micromanaged by editors, and the governing logic behind it seems to follow the directive that Philip Taubman, formerly the deputy editorial page editor, gave to Peter Buchanan-Smith, the page’s former art director, one day, as they spoke casually about the kind of attitude the page should convey: Most of our readers read the op-ed page over breakfast, Taubman had said. What appears on the page should be appetizing.
The last renaissance for illustration in America followed the birth of the op-ed page, when magazines like Esquire, Evergreen, and New York, that catered to the so-called New Journalism, often opted for the kind of surrealist-inspired illustration found in the Times, rather than photography. Into the 1980s Playboy, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic Monthly featured illustrated covers and used extensive in-text art. Weekend newspaper magazines at places like the Cleveland Plain Dealer and The Boston Globe won awards from American Illustration, an annual of the best of avant-garde art that made its debut in 1982. (Unlike the austere annuals of the Society of Illustrators, a venerable 103-year-old establishment based in New York, American Illustration featured a range of young conceptualists who learned from the tradition of the op-ed page.) Into the late 80s, Time magazine regularly hired four illustrators each week to compete to do the cover design, and often sent artists on site with writers to capture the essence of a place. Perhaps the most telling signal that illustration mattered could be found in the pages of magazines like Seventeen, or Penthouse, in which, if you browsed in 1982 you would find — amid the nakedness, the heavenly swoon — some interesting art: a Marshall Arisman illustration of the Reverend Jim Jones, the cult leader, his head and a handgun on a pillow; a Ralph Steadman caricature of Alexander Haig as some long-faced cat dripping blood from its paws; a terrifying Cristobal Toral oil painting of people wrapped like human cargo.
A few mainstays, like The New Yorker, remain loyal to illustration, but celebrity-driven photography and photomontage now dominate the covers of magazines that were once illustration-friendly. The rise of the computer and digital imagery, through Adobe Photoshop, has pushed many basic tasks in-house. Stock houses — companies that provide vast caches of homogenous imagery on the cheap, typically over the Internet — offer an easier and cheaper and quicker alternative to inventive illustration. Every month, it seems, magazines are changing their designs to incorporate more photography.
At the Illustration Conference, Milton Glaser, creator of the ‘I 
New York’
logo, gave a keynote speech about the decline. Glaser likes to talk about the
death of nuance in general, and over the fall we had a few conversations in
which he pointed to television as an instrument that has taken away our ability
to form abstract thoughts. Concurrently, he sees a kind of lowering of the individual
voice. “The corporate voice has become increasingly wary of individual expression,”
he told me. “Increasingly, editors want to control the nature of that voice,
and conform it to some agreed-upon methodology.”
In his speech, Glaser repeated his television mantra and then turned to the differences between photography and illustration. “Photography has another intrinsic characteristic that illustration lacks,” he said. “The innate sense of capturing a ‘real’ moment in time, proving that the subject actually existed.” Glaser insinuated that, because of its believability, photography is the best tool for creating consumer desire. “In a culture that values commerce above all other things,” he continued, “the imaginative potential of illustration has become irrelevant . . . . Illustration is now too idiosyncratic.” One might go a step further. Idiosyncrasy takes time to unravel. It takes an act of interpretation. There is danger implicit in interpretation. It gives the audience time to think, time to get upset, and, perhaps, to get offended.
The invective caricaturist Steve Brodner compares this period to the early Reagan years, when it was difficult to criticize the president in the press. And then, overnight, came Iran-Contra, and Brodner’s career was born. In the wake of the CBS miniseries fiasco in early November, Brodner pitched a fairly harsh, six-paneled “Stranger Than CBS” spoof to the Times featuring “Great Reagan Movie Scenes You Couldn’t Make Up.” The Times rejected it. It would have fit nicely sandwiched in between op-ed pieces by Edmund Morris and Max Frankel that ran on November 9. What ran that day was a bland, silhouetted drawing of an everyman watching Reagan on TV and extrapolating the president into his living room. The idea was literal — seeing is always believing, as the Frankel piece said — but the art failed to invite much thought. And the Reagan portrait didn’t look like Reagan. Brodner’s art, it seems, had fallen out of favor with Times editors since the late ’90s. “Brodner’s characters are downright nasty and that’s why they didn’t like them,” says Nicolas Blechman, op-ed art director from 1999 to 2000. “I got a verbal list from editors. On one side were people who they couldn’t have on the page because of the way they did their portraits, like Brodner and Ralph Steadman. On the other side was Robert Grossman. They loved Robert Grossman’s characters because they were cartoony. They had this nice, fluffy quality to them; his figures looked rubbery, even affable. The drawings didn’t look mean-spirited. It was a more jovial way of making fun of a politician.”
Lyndon Johnson wasn’t jovial — he looked as if he read other people’s dark thoughts and liked them — but Robert Grossman drew him that way, in a May 2002 op-ed piece originally assigned to Brad Holland. The accompanying article, written by Tom Wicker, used the publication of Robert Caro’s biography of Johnson, Master of the Senate, as the occasion for a brief character study of a president divided between ambition and compassion. The narrative leads us to a longish, capping scene in which the author recounts his early, reportorial days on Capitol Hill when, as a Times White House correspondent, he landed an interview with Johnson, soon after Kennedy was murdered. Wicker rushed to the White House and was shown into the Oval Office. LBJ was having his hair cut. Wicker was reduced to nothingness before the man; he just stood there blinking and Johnson seemed to enjoy his unease until, after what seemed like hours, Wicker finally commented on how the nation was lucky to have such a man take over, and Johnson stood up and spoke.
This sort of intimidation tactic was known as the Johnson Treatment. The title of the article (“Remembering the Johnson Treatment”) emphasizes it, as does the single pull-quote (“How the master of the Senate made use of his haircut”). When Holland got the assignment — it was an overnight job — he came up with a quick sketch of LBJ sitting in a barber chair, draped in a sheet, looking at himself vainly in a handheld mirror, with, as if it were a completely normal thing, a Capitol dome atop his head, encircling it just above the eyes, like a bowl for a Texas farm boy haircut, or a crown. “The whole book was about how Lyndon Johnson was the most effective majority leader of the Senate ever,” Holland told me. “It seemed like a leap of the imagination that just made sense.”
Holland faxed the sketch to Steven Guarnaccia, and it was approved. He went to Borders to buy the Caro book to get an informative photograph. Around midnight, he received a call from Guarnaccia, who said his editor didn’t understand why the Capitol dome was on LBJ’s head, and that Holland would have to remove the dome or the Times wouldn’t use the image. In a way, it was an understandable reaction; the illustration requires an imaginative leap. What does the artist mean by the Capitol dome? There is something disarming about its posture. Maybe it struck a raw nerve. Maybe it was just too difficult. In any case Holland refused to cut the dome, the image was rejected, and the Times went to Robert Grossman.
If one artist could be said to embody the taste of today’s editorial illustration industry, it is Robert Grossman. He is a tongue-in-cheek ironist, a cartoonist, and a smart one; his images hit upon our neuroses yet even the most vituperative of them seem tame and acceptable. Take, for example, his post-9/11 Rolling Stone drawing of the reconstructed twin towers, two pillars that form the legs of a giant robotic American male who towers above the city, flipping the world the bird with both hands. “I think it’s better to have fun,” Grossman says wryly. “And I guess if that means I’m a relatively polite person, so be it.”
The LBJ image Grossman did for the Times drew its inspiration from the briefest, most literal of anecdotes: a four-sentence description of Johnson being pulled over for speeding in his native Texas. As the story goes, the cop gasped, “My God,” at seeing Johnson, and Johnson replied, “And don’t you forget it!” The drawing shows him speeding off in a Cadillac, a snarky grin on his affable, cartoony face. It is not a bad drawing. It requires nothing of the reader.
Who else could get away with twin tower birds? Certainly not Bill Russell, who was suspended without pay for fifteen days (it was later reduced to one day) by The San Francisco Chronicle, where he is a staff artist, for an image he drew for the cover of its book review section last April. To illustrate a review of a book about Napa and Sonoma Valley farmers and other natives who resent the intrusion of rich outsiders who impose cosmopolitan culture on the countryside, Russell sketched a farmer on his tractor in a field, a convertible swerving by at high speed. The farmer is gesturing in a way that, if you pull the newspaper close enough to your eyeballs, appears to be (even upon close inspection one can’t be sure) reminiscent of what Grossman made perfectly explicit — the bird, though so tiny it is hard to see.
No editor caught it. The image made it all the way to the printer. A pressman from the paper noticed it and called the newsroom, but it was too late to pull the illustration. The Chronicle published the diminutive bird but ran a page-two editors’ note apologizing in advance for an “objectionable illustration.” Meetings were held to get to the bottom of this. Meanwhile, although Chronicle editors wouldn’t let CJR reprint the image, and although Russell declined to talk about it, the fallout had a ring of absurdity to it, as the illustration generated virtually no complaints.
“Bill read the book,” says Kathleen Rhodes, a Chronicle librarian and unit chair of the Northern California Media Worker’s Guild. “He was trying to look at the ‘them and us’ kind of thing. It was perfect. I think that on some level they were really afraid of offending anyone, and they were really surprised that they didn’t get any responses.”
The strange case of the collagist Stephen Kroninger underscores this kind of hypersensitivity. Kroninger, who had a solo show at the MoMA in 1992, was asked to do biweekly illustrations for the New York Daily News’s Ideas & Opinion page, beginning in the summer of 2001, an assignment that lasted only four months before he pulled out. It was an odd pairing in the first place, given Kroninger’s famously acerbic political work. The second piece he did for the Daily News was inspired by a Labor Day speech by George Bush. “The slogan was about listening to the people,” Kroninger told me. “He was somewhere in the Midwest talking about listening to the heartland, and it was like, yeah, sure, we know who you listen to.”
His collage that week was a portrait of Bush with one big ear, for the rich, and one little ear, for the working people, and he lifted the speech’s slogan as ironic text: “Listening to the American people.” Kroninger sent it in and heard nothing. On Sunday he opened the paper to find someone else’s art in its stead. He wasn’t surprised. He’d been paid. He shrugged it off.
The next incident came after 9/11, when the Environmental Protection Agency publicly stated that the air quality in downtown Manhattan was fine, when people knew it wasn’t fine. (It was later reported that the White House may have pressured the EPA into making such statements.) Kroninger has a friend, the artist Art Spiegelman, whose daughter attends Stuyvesant High School, five blocks from the ruins of the World Trade Center, where classes resumed, some said, too quickly, and where parents were already nervous. “He kept telling me stories about how everybody was saying there was nothing wrong with the air, about how he was trying to get a response from the city, the state, wherever, to say what he already knew, that the air wasn’t fine. Maybe it was okay, but it wasn’t fine. He told me I should do a piece about it, and I did.”
It was an evolution-of-man motif, on a high school chalkboard, with modern man in gas mask and moonsuit and a teacher in the foreground (also wearing a gas mask), giving a science lecture to her students. Atop the collage was accompanying text about potentially “unacceptable” air inside Stuyvesant High School, pulled word-for-word from a Daily News article that had run on November 7. Editors cut that text, the only clue to the picture’s meaning. What remained was a bizarre, indecipherable image that had lost its essence. Was the Daily News concerned about a too-specific reference in the art? Did the quote somehow become dangerous when affixed to art?
The suggestion that there are things people are willing to read, or look at in photographs and movies, that become circumspect in art was a common refrain as I was reporting this story. The classic example dates back to a 1983 drawing Marshall Arisman did for Time. Asked to illustrate a cover story on the death penalty, Arisman produced an image of a man strapped in the electric chair with a skull projecting sideways from his head. The image was cut. In its place ran a black page with “Death Penalty” in huge, white block lettering. Below those words were smaller words, a paragraph descending down and eventually cut off, that expressed the same jolting idea as Arisman’s illustration: “The chair is bolted to the floor near the back of a 12-ft. by 18-ft. room. You sit on a seat of cracked rubber secured by rows of copper tacks. Your ankles are strapped into half-moon-shaped foot cuffs lined with canvas. A 2-in.-wide greasy leather belt with 28 buckle holes and worn grooves where it has been pulled very tight many times is secured around your waist just above . . .”
When I spoke with Arisman he volunteered the image immediately. Something an editor at Time had said stuck with him over the years: We’re a society that’s willing to read all sorts of things about violence, to look at photos about violence. But we’re not willing to look at artwork about violence.
Arisman says he asked why that was so. The editor replied that when people look at photos, they think they’re looking at reality, not a statement by the artist. But when people look at artwork, they think the artist invented it. Again and again it was like this: the image that took the place of the original was so obviously weaker that no rationalization saved it. When I saw them side by side it often seemed comical, no more so than in the case of Mirko Ilic. Maybe it was that in his rough, Bosnian burr he caught the absurdity so well. “You can always sneak things in at the Times,” he was fond of saying, “but that’s not the point. I don’t want to sneak anything in.”
He fired away. “I was working in Yugoslavia, in the time of Communism. Never did I have to show a draft. I come to America, art directors start asking for drafts. I say first, What do you mean ‘drafts’? And second, What do you mean ‘art director?’ Most art directors are females. I call them ‘art secretaries’ because editors are making the decisions. Move left. Move right. They’ve become messengers.”
In 2000, Ilic was asked to illustrate a cover story for The Village Voice looking at how AOL could profit mightily from the porn industry if it chose to, entitled “You’ve Got Porn.” He envisioned the Y in ‘You’ve got mail’ and an upside-down AOL logo as formed by neatly trimmed pubic hair in a female crotch. The image is stunningly realistic, poignant even, and might have been published had Ilic not turned it in on a Friday — he left town for the weekend — rather than his Monday due date. There are divergent accounts of what happened next. Ilic claims that women editors saw the illustration over the weekend and complained that it exploited the female anatomy. The Voice’s p.r. office claims that editor-in-chief Don Forst took it off the cover because it looked “too fleshy.” The image wasn’t altogether rejected — it appeared as a full-page illustration in-text — but in the world of illustration this is the equivalent of a body blow. The back pages of the Voice are full of too-fleshy pictures, advertisements for sexual services, that allow it to be the largest free paper in America. So Ilic called the art director for an explanation. “I said, you’re the largest because of the pimps and whores, the 900 numbers and whatnot which is a direct exploitation of women. And it’s okay for you to publish that but not this? It’s a double standard.”
The image that ran instead was a cartoon penis popping out of a jack-in-the-box, one side of which doubled as a computer monitor flashing the ubiquitous AOL triangle. It had some of the ingredients of Ilic’s illustration. But they’d been reconfigured as gimmicks. I got the point — it was impossible not to get the point. But when I put the two images side by side it was hard not to feel cheated.
It was weird: I didn’t solicit stories about The New York Times but everyone I spoke with had one. Even Robert Grossman, who told me his own Howell Raines tale (involving a too-big nose, a former president, and a late-night emergency Photoshop session). Illustrators didn’t exempt The Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times or anywhere else, but the Times stung the deepest, because of how influential its op-ed art had once been. One day in early November, with images still flooding in, I went there, to Forty-third Street, to visit the op-ed editor David Shipley. I negotiated the maze of the tenth-floor editorial offices and I found Shipley’s room.
I had brought an image rejected by the Times. It was modest, a small picture set beside five letters to the editor about the grim prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. But its circumstances seemed to sum things up. The artist, Cathie Bleck, had been commissioned to create something unspecific, something that would, in a general sense, depict the idea that peace in the Middle East had failed. She had a day to do it. She came up with a Humpty Dumpty motif. It was okayed by Steven Guarnaccia, but rejected by an editor. The image was not all that fresh — Bleck admits it — but what took its place was even less so: a broken peace sign, which was a wheel supporting a wheelbarrow, inside of which were the Star of David and a crescent moon. One obvious icon replaced another.
But we never got to discuss specific images anyway. We got sidetracked, somehow, me telling Shipley about this project, and him interrupting me at times to disapprove. “I have to say, that’s tremendously naïve,” he said. “If you’re comparing an illustration in Glamour or Rolling Stone with one on the op-ed page or in The New Republic.”
Shipley never smiled or frowned. Later I learned he’d written speeches for President Clinton. “I think it would be useful,” he continued, “to make distinctions.” His point is that doing illustration for a daily newspaper — with its tight deadlines and need to respond to breaking news — is often different from illustration done for monthly magazines. He told me about his passion for photography, how he was trying to visually surprise readers by adding things like puzzle pages, stand alone art, and charts and graphs. Then he moved on to caricature. “What’s wrong with hinting at something rather than beating our readers over the head with a sledgehammer, resorting to the obvious?” We talked some more like that, and I believed him. He was opening up the page, and some illustrators I spoke with said he was easier to work with than his predecessor.
But in expanding the experience of the page, as he put it, it seemed to me that something had been lost. And when he then suggested that op-ed was still home to great art, I couldn’t help but feel we were talking across some unbridgeable divide. Everything was fine to him. “Op-ed is one of the last places for black-and-white illustration,” Shipley said. “It’s something we cherish. I want people to think about illustration the same way they think about the articles. They don’t have to get it in the first read.”
Yes, that’s what illustrators wanted, too. But that kind of nuance is rare today.
In the Cathie Bleck illustration, Humpty Dumpty bounces broken-shelled against the ground while a dove of peace watches shamefully, atop a nearby wall. It is succinct, not mysterious. The only human characteristic is a generic, downturned mouth and beady, disgruntled eyes. “It’s an image that’s been used before, sure,” Bleck told me. “When you’re in such a tight timeframe, and you don’t hit the nail on the head a couple times, it’s easy to go back to an image people are comfortable with. Because they wanted something that would convey an array of feelings on the Middle East.”
But she had turned in two other images, one of which might have been at least something to ponder: a surrealist image of an open doorway leading to a barren room with a Turkish façade and cracked walls, indicating, in her words, destruction and introspection. After all I had heard, it seems obvious why this tack didn’t work. But why not Humpty Dumpty?
I looked and looked at it. Guarnaccia had e-mailed Bleck saying, “Thanks for the wonderful job,” and hours later it had been rejected. Hidden somewhere was a fatal flaw, but what? I remembered something Robert Grossman had told me, regarding faces. They almost never use an identifiable face, he had said. “Human faces make them nervous, so they often use something that’s symbolic — hammers and sickles and stars.”
And so Mark Podwal came to mind. Among other things, he does Arafats, and nobody could ever accuse the man of being impartial. He’d shown me three Arafats he had done for the Times that also seemed to sum things up, but differently. In a way, it was irrelevant to look; if they didn’t let Humpty Dumpty through there was no way Arafat would get through. And if you couldn’t draw Arafat, and you couldn’t humanize Humpty Dumpty, what was left in the middle?
But I did look. The first image was of Arafat as a bomb, wearing sunglasses and his kaffiyeh, which ran in 1980 beside a letter to the editor. The second image was intended for a 1996 op-ed article that asked the questions, “Will the PLO stop terrorism? Can Arafat change his spots?” The original he submitted depicted Arafat as half lamb, half leopard, with his kaffiyeh on, and as the kaffiyeh draped down its spots became bombs, and as it merged with the leopard you saw that the leopard’s spots were also bombs. Jerelle Kraus had fought for that one. First an editor removed the bombs on the leopard, then the bombs on the kaffiyeh, then the kaffiyeh altogether, so all that remained was a ridiculous-looking hybrid creature.
You might say he did the third one intentionally bland. Because he knew how times had changed. This was last year. He didn’t even bother drawing Arafat. He simply drew the kaffiyeh, and as it flowed down it became a map of Palestine. But you know the story with that one. Because you never saw it.
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