This jam-packed, supersized newsletter covers the art and illustrations in the May 14, May 28, June 11, and June 25 issues of the Review. It’s brought to you by Lewis Carroll’s Alice: The Photographs, Books, Papers and Personal Effects of Alice Liddell and Her Family, the catalog for a 2001 Sotheby’s auction that I recently found in my ex-husband’s basement, where I had left it many years ago after using it to research an old project. I enjoy reading history via auction catalogs, and, paging through this one anew, I was struck by a number of details I’d forgotten or missed the first time around. Alice’s lorgnettes and letters; that her sister Lorina Liddell was called “Ina”; that part of the lawn of the Deanery Garden where Carroll and Alice first met was a grass tennis court; that Alice was taught to draw by John Ruskin; and that she received a pearl horseshoe from Prince Leopold as a wedding present.
The most interesting objects in the catalog, though, were Lewis Carroll’s glass negatives. Seeing those famous photographs of young Alice but in eerie inverted tones made me think of the scenes in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest that he shot with an infrared camera to depict the energy and desperation of a young member of the Polish resistance. The negatives hinted at the zone of discomfort Carroll often inspires.
The May 14 issue was our annual Art Issue, and we inaugurated a new feature, “At the Galleries”: timely, brief reviews of smaller art shows.
For the issue cover we chose firoza (2022), a painting by the Kabul-born, Berlin-based artist Tamina Amadyar. Her work was recently featured in “Auto-Paragone,” a group show at Berlin’s Galerie Guido W. Baudach. I was introduced to her art by the book editor Friederike Schilbach, who came to New York in time to join one of the monthly dinners Balthazar has been throwing for our contributors.
I found a vigorous portrait of our pink-faced president by the French artist Didier Viodé to accompany Fintan O’Toole’s essay about the irrationality of Donald Trump. Viodé’s painting is part of “The Comedians,” a series he made in 2018 depicting world leaders. We used Jess Allen’s decidedly literate painting Book Piles 3 (2021) to illustrate Clare Bucknell’s review of a cultural history of pedantry. Michelle Mildenberg drew Patrick Radden Keefe and the city he writes about in his new book London Falling, reviewed by Mark O’Connell. And Yann Kebbi drew a sagacious Seamus Heaney for Nick Laird’s essay about the poet and his voluminous achievements. Kebbi recently had a show at the Gallery of L’Académie des beaux-arts in Paris.
For the cover of the May 28 issue, I could not pass up the chance to feature our logo and coverlines in the negative space in Jacques-Louis David’s famous 1793 painting The Death of Marat. The painting’s proportions are ideal for our magazine’s dimensions, and its subject matter nodded to Lynn Hunt’s review of two books about Marat. It was the shortest cover meeting in four years.
Vivienne Flesher made room in her schedule to draw Ben Lerner for Christopher Tayler’s review of his new novel. When the editors weighed in on her sketch, she told us our feedback was “more erudite and humorous” than she gets from any other publication. For David Wheatley’s review of some contemporary poetry books, I tried out a new illustrator, the Boston-based Naï Zakharia, for a double-portrait of the Scottish poets Kathleen Jamie and Peter Davidson; and for Charlie Lee on John Gregory Dunne’s Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, I returned to our stalwart Grant Shaffer for Dunne’s likeness.
I’ve been hoping to work with another new contributor, the Ottawa-based illustrator Mike Haddad, and he made a seemingly totalitarian bookstore for Louisa Lim’s essay about the pressures facing fiction writers in Hong Kong.
The series art for the issue is by John Broadley.
The painting on the June 11 cover, Orangenkiste (2018), is by the New York–based artist Jule Korneffel, whose work appeared in our pages earlier this year, alongside an essay about algebra by Dan Rockmore. One of the editors pointed out that the language of the Marianne Boruch poem inside the issue, “Voices in Rome,” coincided nicely with Orangenkiste: “in rain. A blur, like another language is/a mix of color.” Korneffel’s work is bold, bright, and brainy, and she recently had a show at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, on the Lower East Side.
The issue opens with an essay adapted from a lecture Zadie Smith gave at the American Academy of Arts and Letters on the purpose of making art—especially at a dangerous historical moment. Smith suggested a few images to illustrate it, and we most liked Thomas Hart Benton’s painting City Building, from 1930.
I asked Harriet Lee-Merrion to draw Makenna Goodman for Joanna Biggs’s review of Goodman’s second novel, Helen of Nowhere.
After reading Christopher Byrd’s essay about the novelist Mathias Énard, and then looking for pictures of Énard, I determined that Henning Wagenbreth, whom I felt might share a certain eclecticism with the French novelist, would make a good portrait.
For Jonathan Mingle’s review of a book about methane and global warming, I looked for paintings about “atmosphere.” The Canadian painter Nancy Friedland’s pink-skied and slightly smoggy painting Hush (2024) fit the bill. David Blight wrote about the ideologues attempting to claim American history for certain ideas about the national character—and the need to reclaim history from them—so to illustrate it one of our assistant editors found a glorious 1859 painting by Albert Bierstadt of a thunderstorm over the western frontier.
M. W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin wrote critically about sociobiologists’ attempts to determine genetic causes for social inequality, and Paul Sahre illustrated the sociobiologists’ mad quest with a DNA harpoon. Michelle Mildenberg returned to draw Hu Anyan for Rumaan Alam’s review of Anyan’s memoir of life as a package courier in Beijing.
The series art in the issue, titled Currents, is by a recent School of Visual Arts MFA graduate, Bernardo Bagulho, who cold-emailed me looking for illustration work.
It’s an unofficial, largely unacknowledged tradition that we (I!) try to put a swimmer on the cover sometime during the summer months, so at the cover meeting for our June 25 issue I quietly suggested Emerging, an energetic painting by Terry Ekasala of three swimmers bathing languidly in green water.
The first two essays in the issue are about AI. Dan Chiasson considers the technology’s effect on writing and thinking—how it eliminates the opportunity to get stuck and have to rethink one’s thoughts. He references the pools of ink that accumulate in Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts, indicating where her pen stopped on the page midthought, so we thought a page from her herbarium would be an apt illustration. Chiasson’s editor, a native of Canada like me, sent a note about the pressed trillium—“nice Ontario content”—as it is our official provincial flower. The second AI essay is by Meghan O’Gieblyn, who considers the strange rhymes and disjunctions between teaching AI and raising children. Something in her writing brought to mind ideas of iteration and transmission, and I remembered a painting by the filmmaker Gus Van Sant, Untitled Mona Lisa 10 (2021), that I’d seen at a boutique outside Palm Springs in March.
After the London-based illustrator Paul Davis read a draft of Michael Gorra’s review of a book about American literary agents, he drew one flying through the air on wings of pages, brandishing a martini and scalpel. At the last minute, he added talons to her feet.
Camille Deschiens drew a sensitive likeness of Harriet Clark for Laura Miller’s review of Clark’s debut novel, The Hill. Deschiens sent some references to the Belgian illustrator Jean-Michel Folon’s dreamlike landscapes with her sketch. Fun fact: seeing Folon’s work in a small show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I was fifteen set me on a course to one day live in New York City.
I asked the Berlin-based Sophia Martineck for a portrait of Thomas Mann in a sanatorium to go along with Adam Kirsch’s essay about Mann and The Magic Mountain. Martineck described her sketch: “My idea was to show Mann in a typical room inside the sanatorium with a wooden lounge chair. The doors to the balcony are closed while an avalanche hits the balcony as a metaphor of the Great War raging in Europe.”
The writer and designer Oliver Munday gave us a colorful collage of the New York School poets for Joe Dunthorne’s essay about a new book of interviews with, among others, Ron Padgett, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, Bernadette Mayer, Lewis Warsh, and Ted Berrigan.
The series art in the issue, by Lorenzo Gritti, is called Highlighter Pens and a Brush 01.
The looking glass is a flat-screen TV, and you can get through it.