Neigh!

written and illustrated by Leanne Shapton

The first art newsletter of 2026, the year of the horse according to the Chinese zodiac, is inspired by a 1947 book I came across in the London Library a few years ago: The Handling and General Management of the Thoroughbred Stallion, by C.G. Fitch, which includes a generous complement of horse photographs. I painted some quick studies based on photos of the thirty-two “stayers” (horses bred for endurance and stamina for longer-distance races), with names like Spearmint, Mahmood, Precipitation, Blenheim, Persimmon, and Bois Roussel.

At the end of the year, with the nights cold and bright with ice, neon, and strings of lights, I was introduced to the gallerist James Fuentes at a reading by the writer Alex Auder, and so I ended up looking into the artists Fuentes’s gallery represents. When I came upon work by the painter Izzy Barber, her streets and glowing nighttime interiors felt right for the suspended time between December and January. We chose her painting Downtown Lights (2021) for the cover of our first issue of 2026.

The issue opens with the second part of Susan Tallman’s two-part essay about the ethics and logistics of museums displaying or repatriating plundered art, which we illustrated with a photograph of a sculpture of the last king of Dahomey that the Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, in Paris, repatriated to Benin five years ago. Next up is Kevin Power’s review of the 2025 Booker Prize–winning novel Flesh, by David Szalay. I asked Yann Kebbi for a portrait of Szalay, which he drew in pencil and pen on pale yellow notebook paper.

We used a 2020 Rahim Fortune photograph of a rundown payday loan outpost to illustrate Marilynne Robinson’s essay about the crisis of affordability in America. I have been waiting for the right article to pair with a piece by the Kentucky-born, New York–based artist Elliott Puckette, whose paintings are both calligraphic and musical, and the pianist Jeremy Denk’s essay about Erik Satie was the perfect occasion. We chose an untitled curlicued blue painting from 2008.

When I read Yiyun Li on the English novelist Beryl Bainbridge, I thought of the portraits of writers that Gaby Wood has done for us in the past (Janet Frame, Diana Athill, Hilary Mantel). She sent a quick ink sketch, with an eye toward making it into a woodcut, but I encouraged her to stick with ink, as a linocut print by Hugo Guinness had just landed in my inbox. (More about Guinness’s illustration below.) She tried a few anyway, as detailed in an Instagram post, but the lightness of that first sketch won out.

For Robert P. Baird’s review of Ross Douthat’s book Believe: Why Everybody Should Be Religious—an essay that contrasted the epistemology of “Douthat’s own strain of conservative Catholicism” with that of scientific skeptics who believe humanity to be but an incidental part of a vast cosmos—Baird’s editor imagined Douthat with “the universe behind him.” This felt right, so I asked Michelle Mildenberg if she could take it on. She delivered a galactic Douthat. When I read Bill McKibben’s essay about carbon dioxide, I searched for landscapes that might evoke the hazy terror of the emissions that threaten life on our planet. I found a 2018 piece by the Queens-based artist and designer Leah Horowitz: a dark and glowing landscape foregrounded by a disconcertingly bright ocean.

There seem to be only a few extant images of the nineteenth-century American supernatural writer Fitz-James O’Brien, so Hugo Guinness did his best with the scant source images and made a strong but sweet print for Michael Dirda’s essay about O’Brien. By a nice coincidence, Guinness’s illustration ran in the same issue as the painting by Elliott Puckette, his spouse.

Clair Wills’s essay about her experience of hereditary hemochromatosis sent me straight to Louise Bourgeois, who made a number of blood-red paintings and drawings during her career. Her human shapes and blobs and bodies feel alive and thoughtful, and we chose one called Femme, from 2007.

The Canadian painter Margaux Williamson made this issue’s series art in my kitchen during an autumn visit, after we saw some art shows in Tribeca.

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