A conversation with Françoise Mouly, Art editor at The New Yorker.
Exhibition at L’Alliance News York: Covering The New Yorker (free, until March 30, 2025) | Click Here
Talk with Françoise Mouly at L’Alliance New York on Sunday, March 30, 2025 at 6pm | tickets here
Find links to all the artworks mentioned in this post at the end.
Françoise Mouly is possibly the most New Yorker of all French women. Rightly so.
Since The New Yorker was founded 100 years ago, she has served as its fourth artistic editor, a position she has held for more than three decades. Every week, she selects an illustration worthy of the magazine’s legendary cover, a position that has always been central to its identity.
In the first cover of The New Yorker, dated February 21, 1925, Rea Irvin, the distant predecessor of Françoise Mouly, depicted a dandy, later named Eustace Tilley, peering a butterfly through his monocle—a caricature of the early 19th-century French amateur artist Count d’Orsay, who indulged in the art of portraiture. This whimsical image played like a musical note, the first in a never-ending media and artistic score that the magazine has composed since then.
Many artists, famous and not, have illustrated the cover of The New Yorker. Among them were David Hockney, Frank Stella, Sempé, Saul Steinberg, and Peter Arno. But the process is the same for each one, famous or not: the artist submits a drawing, and Françoise Mouly, in collaboration with the editor-in-chief, currently David Remnick, selects the one that will become a snapshot of the magazine’s voice for that week.
The cover of The New Yorker is a cultural and editorial marker, one that Françoise Mouly has helped shape for decades.
As she sat on a sofa at the entrance of L’Alliance New York for a conversation on the creative process behind The New Yorker covers, the adjacent gallery presented an exclusive series of artworks to celebrate the magazine’s milestone. Some became iconic New Yorker front pages—such as Maira Kalman’s Dog Reads Book or Ana Juan’s Solidarité, published after the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris, France—while others were never published.
One of the artworks exhibited at L’Alliance New York stands possibly among the most significant illustrations Françoise Mouly worked on. She published it soon after the 9/11 attacks. That morning, she was first and foremost a New York mother of two, not thinking about how the tragic news might impact her role as artistic editor at The New Yorker.
“September 11, 2001, is the day I learned to trust my own emotions,” Mouly reflects.
It was a Tuesday, New York City’s mayoral election day. Françoise was walking down Greene Street in SoHo ready to go vote with her husband, graphic novelist and author of Maus Art Spiegelman, when she heard the roar of a plane flying at low altitude and saw its tail crash into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
“I first called my boss to do my duty as a journalist. Then Art wanted to turn back to follow the news on TV. I was screaming his name, ‘Art, Art,’ and thought others would take pictures. It wasn’t my problem. What motivated me was going there fast because my 14-year-old daughter had just started school at Stuyvesant High School,” a short walk away from the doomed towers.
Françoise, having studied architecture, immediately feared debris might fall on the school. On that bright, soft, and calm summery morning, she and her husband raced through the streets amidst the blaring emergency vehicles. In the chaos, they were the only parents who managed to enter the school before it was locked down.
“We spent an hour, maybe an hour and a half trying to find out where my daughter was; 10,000 kids had just started school, and ‘they’ didn’t know. They made an announcement asking students to stay in their classrooms, awaiting instructions from the Department of Education. I also wanted to take one or two of my daughter’s friends with me.” But the school refused unless there was a parental faxed permission, and no communication was getting through. “We managed to find our daughter, and then there was a kind of earthquake, and all the computers, all the lights went out. It was the first tower collapsing. I didn’t know that. All I could think of was getting my daughter out of there.”
As soon as they stepped outside, the second tower collapsed in a thunderous crash of metal and broken glass. “We were surrounded by dust and people covered in white, running north, screaming. My daughter, my husband, and I were stunned, not understanding what was happening. Art heard on the radio that it was a terrorist thing and that something had also happened in Washington; he was starting to understand.”
At that point, Françoise’s only thought was now to find her son, a student at UNIS, the United Nations International School, on 25th Street and FDR Drive, less than 20 blocks south of the United Nations building.
That’s when her assistant contacted her: ‘Your office called. They want a cover.’
“My reaction was totally instinctive: anything but that. I couldn’t put on my professional hat,” Françoise recalls. “I went to get my son, and then I spoke to another mother, explaining that I had to go to my office because I had to make a magazine cover. This woman—who had just gone through the same experience—stared at me:
‘Don’t go to the office,’ she told me. ‘Make the cover completely black.’”
JC Agid: So, you are now reunited with your two children and have this woman’s idea in mind. Just blackness. A hollow, black cover. How did you come up with the final result?
Françoise Mouly: My husband was drawing an image. Other artists were also drawing images. And honestly, I had seen what Art was doing, and two or three proposals, and it didn’t match what was happening. Yet, I had to show them to David Remnick.
I biked to the office, first stopping by my husband’s studio to pick up his CD. Art came down to the street, and I told him I thought we should go with a black cover.
‘Then consider black on black,’ Art told his wife. ‘You should draw the towers, black on black.’
Art Spiegelman to Françoise Mouly, September 11, 2001
Sitting in front of my computer, I realized this was the only possible response at that moment: an image that denies the image yet still carries the power of art to evoke that moment.
The shadowed style of the cover published after Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. Presidential election in the November 18, 2024, issue seems to echo the one created after the September 11 attacks, doesn’t it?
The two are connected.
Did you have a piece ready in case of a Donald Trump victory?
No, no, no… I was asked about it because my boss isn’t as stubborn as I am. He had prepared the rest of the magazine for both scenarios—A and B. David asked me the week before, then again during the weekend, and finally the day before what was the plan B. I showed him some images, but I was not convinced by any of them. One of my plan B was to do nothing. We would leave the cover blank.
Meaning, absolutely nothing?
A traditional autumn cover. He said, ‘No, that’s not a good plan.’ I showed him images that some artists had sent, but I hadn’t reached out to many people. I hadn’t had conversations with them because I don’t like asking artists, ‘Imagine how you’d feel if this or that happens.’
To be somewhat prepared but without presuming the final outcome.
I have a perfect example of waiting until the last moment: it was the election of Barack Obama. I hadn’t prepared a cover, unlike other magazines, because we didn’t dare believe it. Obama’s election had been so tumultuous; it was miraculous. That night, I received something quickly done by
Bob Staake—an image of Lincoln’s Tomb with the moon above it, without Barack Obama in it. But for the American eye, it was a historic moment. Moreover, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his speech at the Lincoln Tomb. Every American knows that. It was perfect—it captured the astonishment, joy, and surprise of all Americans, not just those who voted for Obama.
The first African American elected President of the United States: a historic election…
…that wasn’t contested, even from the other side.
There was respect between John McCain and Barack Obama.
Yes, even McCain’s supporters understood that Obama’s election was historic. In my office, I was told, “It’s fantastic: all the copies sold out.”
I was then asked if I could create a poster for the inauguration, ten weeks later in January. I suggested the cover image (note: with Lincoln’s tomb).
“We want a new image,” I was told.
“You don’t understand: this image corresponds to a lived moment. Everyone wants it because we will remember how we heard the news.”
“No, no, no,” they said. “Ask the artists to create a new image for the inauguration,” so I did.
We published a cover showing Barack Obama with George Washington’s wig and didn’t sell three copies. This image represented nothing. It was manufactured.
Yet, it did represent the news, didn’t it?
It was no longer the artist’s emotion—it was the editors’ decision. It was what we call in English, ‘Asking backward.’ It was all wrong and upside down—me asking an artist to draw a portrait of Obama that would represent the emotion we might feel at his inauguration. It was anticipating that moment.
Which should be avoided?
You shouldn’t do that. It deprives you of truly feeling things.
Last November, it worked out well… because you had not anticipated Donald Trump’s victory.
No. So, I called an artist I work with often, Barry Blitt, and asked him to quickly send me a little sketch. ‘But do it very fast and very small; I want to enlarge it, and I want it to have a feeling of (Françoise does not finish her sentence but mimics disgust and rejection instead). I want this drawing now—no half hour, no hour-long wait. It’s 9:40 p.m. on election night. The result hadn’t been confirmed yet, but we could publish it the following morning.
A sketch made on the fly!
I told Blitt, ‘You take a pencil. I want it to be an ink stain. I want it to look like it was made very quickly, in a rush.’
The speed of execution is very important. This is where the artist’s hand matters.
