Sponsored by Thames & Hudson

A dispatch from our Art Editor, Leanne Shapton, on the art and illustrations in the Review’s August 20 issue.

On a recent Friday afternoon, I visited the Judd Foundation building at 101 Spring Street and was taken on a tour of the space by their new director of design, Alexandra Cunningham Cameron.

Donald Judd bought the building in 1968. He lived and worked there (and in his other residences in Texas and Switzerland) until his death at sixty-five, in 1994. Like his carefully constructed art, there are many precise details to admire at the foundation. I particularly enjoyed the vast wooden ceiling on the third floor, which mirrors the planks on the floor below, and the baseboards Judd installed on the top level, which give the space a quiet domestic touch. Each spoon and trivet felt like a larger part of his practice, a portrait of the artist in boots and books, pots and pans.

Our Summer Issue cover is by Lisa Hanawalt, the funny-as-all-heck cartoonist and animator behind the brilliant shows Tuca and Bertie and BoJack Horseman, as well as hilarious illustrated books like Hot Dog Taste Test (2016) and, most recently, I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex.

Hanawalt sent a handful of sketches for the cover, and we chose a rooftop rendezvous, set during the “dimity, duskety hour,” as Hanwalt described it. Earlier this month, I interviewed Hanawalt about the cover and her practice.

Matthew Aucoin wrote about the composer Dylan Mattingly, and James McMullan sent in a lively portrait in profile, with dancing musical notation streaming out behind Mattingly. I asked Harriet Lee-Merrion to take on Anahid Nersessian’s review of Killing Spree, by the poet Jorie Graham. Lee-Merrion wrote that she wanted to show Graham’s “wonderful white hair, contrasting to a big black sweater (since in pictures she seems to wear black attire).”

Yann Kebbi drew the writer John Lanchester for Laura Marsh’s essay about his latest novel, Look What You Made Me Do. In Kebbi’s portrait, Lanchester’s head seems to glow, animated perhaps by the themes of surveillance, crypto, and online disturbance that Marsh details in her review. For David Cole on Trump’s interference with and influence on the Supreme Court, I turned to designer Paul Sahre, who has done great political work for us before. He inserted a glowering, berobed Trump alongside the justices in their official SCOTUS group portrait.

Deborah Eisenberg wrote about the German postwar novelist Wolfgang Koeppen, and I asked the Berlin-based illustrator Henning Wagenbreth for a portrait. He had coincidentally visited Koeppen’s birthplace, Greifswald, two weeks earlier. He drew Koeppen in Munich amid the ruins of World War II, surrounded by pigeons. He also included, he explained to me, “some stones/rubble on the ground because at the end of [one of Koeppen’s] novels an American soldier will be stoned because of false allegations.”

The series art, titled “Conversations with Pens,” is by Ginger Sorbara, a Toronto-based architect and designer.

It was a relief to think of the greatness of one Donald in contrast to another. Judd’s spaces, symmetries, and collections left me with a feeling of peace and solidity, a rare thing in a summer of destabilizing news.

—Leanne Shapton

New Subscriber Benefit!

Subscribers are now able to share unlocked versions of our articles with friends, family, and social media channels. When signed in to your account, look for this gift box icon in any of our articles.

Special Offer
Subscribe for just $1 an issue

Get the deal

Politics   Literature   Arts   Ideas

You are receiving this message because you signed up
for email newsletters from The New York Review.

Update your address or preferences

View this newsletter online

The New York Review of Books
207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016