INTRODUCTION

To be quiet and nearly invisible was not Tina Brown’s way. She had decided on three
artists she wanted to bring to the magazine: Richard Avedon (who became the first New
Yorker staff photographer), Edward Sorel, and Art Spiegelman. Art proposed an image
that ran as a Valentine’s Day cover in 1993 (see page 24), showing a black woman and a
Hasidic Jew in a loving embrace. That first Spiegelman cover caused a media frenzy. Irate
readers threatened to cancel their subscriptions, and heated arguments raged everywhere
over its meaning and taste. In a multilayered, irreverent, and ironic cover, Brown had
found an image that set the tone she wanted for the magazine. Shortly thereafter, she
asked me to join the staff as art editor.

TRYING TO FIND MY BEARING IN THOSE EARLY DAYS, I rummaged through the magazine’s

archives. I was attracted to the decorative qualities of the covers
from the twenties; their posterlike immediacy showed how
images can be designed to catch your attention on a crowded
newsstand. The influences of the “high” arts evident in Shawn’s
covers (especially in the work of his most prominent protégé,
Saul Steinberg) offered a hint of how images could also stand up
to scrutiny on a million coffee tables. But it has always been the
covers from the thirties through the fifties that I wanted to show
to contemporary artists to say “Top that!” Those covers tell a
story—like William Cotton’s Irish cop who looks suspiciously
at a reveler decked out to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day. Such
covers show us what urban sophisticates chuckled at decades
ago, their attitudes and prejudices, their mannerisms and jokes.
I’ve pushed the artists week after week, believing that they can
create images that, looked at from a later vantage point, might
give a similarly nuanced and telling portrait of our society.

Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and reporter David Remnick
took over after Tina Brown’s departure in 1998, and we all—the
new editor, the artists, and myself—adapted to a new sensibility.
In early 1999, late at home one evening, I brought up to Art a
news event I thought Remnick might find worth addressing—if
one could find a way. On February 4, 1999, four white police
officers in the Bronx, with little apparent provocation, fired
forty-one times on Amadou Diallo, a twenty-three-year-old

unarmed West African immigrant, killing him. It was a thorny issue, one I had not
solicited sketches about: The circumstances of the shooting were hazy, and I, for one, had
found myself unable to explain what seemed like a senseless and brutal killing. There had
been some public outrage, especially at Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s insistence that the New
York Police Department was “just about the most restrained police department in the
country,” but the story was already dropping from the news. Very quickly, Art sketched

In a welcome shift, contemporary artists know to avoid
rather than exploit ethnic stereotypes. An artist thinking
about a Saint Patrick’s Day image might now show an
Asian American youngster dressed head to toe in bright
green—but the Irish cop is no longer de rigueur.

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