What artist wouldn't feature the famous black glasses in illustrating an article about Philip Johnson? Add author Mark Stevens' focus on the metaphorical black eye that Johnson's long and well-documented Fascist fascination has given the architect's legacy, and you have yourself a gimme. Milan Trenc brings the drawing off nicely, with the squiggly shadow below the glasses adding a Chwastian touch.
It's a typographical "illustration" today, by the Op-Ed page's frequent provider of same, graphic designer Alexander Isley. Sometimes this approach produces busy, anonymous-looking collages of type, but Isley's piece today is deft. Meshing the lines of the Monroe Doctrine with those of Bush's inaugural speech, a bookish serif typeface with the sans-serif all-caps of a speaker's printed text, he creates one focal point at the word "liberty", common to both documents. Unfortunately for Op-Ed contributor Tom Wolfe, that elegant confluence of type belies the weakness of his argument that Bush's speech constitutes a fourth corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
Yesterday's Op-Art by Christoph Niemann pokes whimsical fun at NYC's aging subway system, where a recent fire destroyed some century-old electromechanical switches and caused many riders the opposite of fun. Niemann's passel of little cartoons depicts the purported ancient origins of underground commonplaces like the tripartitle revolving doors (made from a dinosaur's spiky tail), the train's engines (galley slaves, which would explain a lot) and service advisory posters (the tablets handed down on Mount Sinai). As usual, Niemann is an unrivaled stylist but a rather restrained humorist: Where are the gags about subway pest control or the highway banditry of rising fares? The closest he gets to a real jibe is to compare those garbled P.A. system announcements to the inscrutable pronouncements of the Sphinx. Though the MTA gets off too easy here, still I bet New York kids loved this piece—at least, the ones who got to see it. It's like getting a tiny, Niemann-penned children's book in the middle of your big boring black-and-white Times. And the subway map as cave painting ("circa 20,000 BC") is pretty priceless. (Note: Can't seem to generate a permalink to this page, so I'm afraid this art may not be accessible from here for long.)
It's a classic rock kinda day on the Op-Ed page. Wesley Bedrosian's drawing recalls the '70s work of Roland Topor or Brad Holland, what with the surrealistic clouds, the figure's weirdly sculpted hair, and crosshatching out the ying-yang. But where Topor might have been content to just evoke the conflict at the heart of the editorial, today's drawing mirrors Wright's argument in graphic storytelling that is parable-clear. The man with his head and shoulders in the clouds represents Bush (but doesn't resemble him—no caricatures, please, we're the Times). He strides right, holding a small rightward arrow like a torch in his beefy fist. Meanwhile, below the clouds a thicket of bigger arrows points left. The man is unable to see the leftward arrows through the cloud cover; this is clear from the mottled, carefully crosshatched shadows the clouds cast on them, a nice touch. It's an almost-too-perfect picturing of Wright's thesis: that Bush's noisy fervor to crush despots militarily has blinded him to ways that the rest of the world is fighting tyranny: through good ol' capitalism. Not bad, though I doubt Topor would have deigned to employ anything so efficiently symbolic as an arrow.
Aharon Appelfeld's starkly philosophical survivor's meditation on Auschwitz makes a daunting assignment for Mark Podwal, who has created what looks discomfortingly like a logo for the Holocaust. Podwal's forceful, freehand style seems very right here: the messy junctures of the Star of David's interior corners, the needle's big, lopsided eye. The needle's path through the top of the star at once suggests lethal violence and references the cloth stars that the Nazis forced Jews to wear before liquidating the ghettos and shipping the wearers to their deaths--graphic wit, if it's not too crass to call it that. The thread made of barbed wire seems appropriate as well: however overused barbed wire is as an icon of oppression, the stuff does have a strong historical association with the camps. But then having the barbed wire encircle the star... to me, that's over-literal.
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