One of the last bastions of wordless storytelling
L’Alliance New York is commemorating 100 years of the New Yorker with an exhibition that celebrates the magazine’s covers. The show will feature the paintings other original artwork that became New Yorker covers, and artists spotlighted include Roz Chast, Kadir Nelson, Ed Steed, Adrian Tomine and others.
At Fast Company, Françoise Mouly, the New Yorker art editor—and co-curator of the exhibition—talks about the distinctive works that are featured on the cover each week (paywalled):
“The New Yorker cover stands as one of the last bastions of wordless storytelling in our culture, a place where an artist’s singular vision can still speak directly to readers. In an age when we’re all flooded with a torrent of anonymous, manufactured images, these carefully crafted covers serve as an antidote—each one signed by an artist, each one attempting to crystallize a moment or catalyze an idea.”
Mouly makes art herself and has long worked with other innovative artists. In 1980, with her husband, Art Spiegelman, she co-founded RAW, the pioneering avant-garde anthology magazine that was home to Richard McGuire’s Here long before it became a stunning graphic novel that apparently should never have been adapted for film.
In the Fast Company story, the New Yorker’s Mouly discusses some of her tenure’s most treasured covers, and among them is “Missed Connection.”
By now, award-winning Brooklyn comics artist Adrian Tomine has created tons of poignant cover illustrations for the New Yorker, but “Missed Connection” was his first.
Tomine was still living in his native California when he began to secure work for the magazine’s front-of-book section and film reviews under art director Christine Curry. A few years later, in 2003, he moved to New York City. He was filling sketchbooks while riding the subway when Mouly encouraged him to submit sketches for the cover.
“Having just arrived in New York, he noticed things that natives often forget, like how subway cars running on parallel tracks offer glimpses into other lives,” Mouly told Fast Company. “When I asked him to consider ideas for our fiction issue, he began sketching this subway encounter.”
Mouly says he basically ghosted her for a year before filing “Missed Connection,” but he finally sent it in, and the cover—a work on paper done with pens, a brush and ink before Tomine scanned it and added color—ran in 2004. It also appears in New York Drawings, a collection of the artist’s illustrations published by Drawn & Quarterly, the Canadian company that has been home to Tomine’s Optic Nerve comic series since the mid–1990s.
L’Alliance New York’s “Covering the New Yorker” exhibition closes on March 30, 3025.
Image © 2004 Adrian Tomine for the New Yorker.
