A conversation with Françoise Mouly, art editor at The New Yorker, and founder of Raw. Interview by Anne Quito

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I first met Françoise Mouly at The New Yorker’s old Times Square offices. This was way back when artists used to deliver illustrations in person. I had stopped by to turn in a spot drawing and was introduced to Françoise, their newly-minted cover art editor.

I should have been intimidated, but I was fresh off the boat from Canada and deeply ensconced in my own bubble—hockey, baseball, Leonard Cohen—and so not yet aware of her groundbreaking work at Raw magazine.

Much time has passed since that fortuitous day and I’ve thankfully caught up with her ouevre—gonna get as many French words into this as I can—through back issues of Raw and TOON Books. But mostly with The New Yorker, where we have worked together for over 30 years and I’ve been afforded a front-row seat to witness her mode du travail, her nonpareil mélange of visual storytelling skills.

Speaking just from my own experience, I can’t tell you how many times at the end of a harsh deadline I’ve handed in a desperate, incoherent mess of watercolor and ink, only to see the published product a day later magically made whole, readable, and aesthetically pleasing.

Because Françoise prefers her artists to get the credit, I assume she won’t want me mentioning the many times she rescued my images from floundering. I can remember apologetically submitting caricatures with poor likenesses, which she somehow managed to fix with a little manipulation numérique—a hairline move forward here, a nose sharpened there. Or ideas that mostly worked turned on their head—with the artist’s permission, of course—to suddenly drive the point all the way home.

For Françoise, “the point” is always the point. Beautiful pictures are fine, but what does the image say? Françoise maintains a wide circle of devoted contributing artists—from renowned gallery painters to scribbling cartoonists, and all gradations between—from whom she regularly coaxes their best work. I thank my étoiles chanceuses to be part of that group.

And now, an interview with Françoise. Apparently.

—Barry Blitt

“I’m only the fourth art editor in a hundred years. So the weight of history is not lost on me. This is quite a responsibility.”

Anne Quito: It’s so nice to meet you, enchanté. Over the weekend I had the great delight of visiting your exhibition at L’Alliance Française—or L’Alliance now—“Covering The New Yorker.”

Françoise Mouly: Yes, yes. I’m so glad you saw it.

Anne Quito: It traces this sort of like centuries-worth legacy of The New Yorker in terms of its covers. Such an astounding array of images. How did you and your co-curators decide what goes in and out?

Françoise Mouly: Oh, that’s an easy answer. In the case of the exhibit we wanted to focus—my co-curator is Rodolphe Lachat—when we were offered to do an exhibit, we wanted to focus specifically on artists who had original art.

Of all of the covers, there’s been so many covers that have been published, more than 1,500 during my tenure, and yes, it’s a lot of little babies. And I wouldn’t have been able to find a guiding principle, except this one was a specific concrete one: who still works on paper, or on canvas, or on oil, has a physical original. Because we almost eliminated everybody who works on the tablet and whose work is produced digitally.

We gave a token display of a few of these artists: David Hockney, Jorge Colombo, who actually drew some of his covers on his phone, [Christoph] Niemann, who does a lot of work digitally and has done like augmented reality covers, Malika Favre who is an artist that works in the vector software—it’s Illustrator, and it’s very geometric, and it can scale up. So we took advantage of that and we made large blowups of three of them.

Anne Quito: Incredible. Yes.

Françoise Mouly: Yes. So for that we were guided by availability, like who has originals. And we contacted all of the artists that I’ve been working with for the past 20 years that I know work in the physical realm. And made a list of who had what originals.

Anne Quito: It, it struck me—so it’s a hundred years of The New Yorker—it struck me that you’ve been there almost for a third of its history.

Françoise Mouly: Isn’t that amazing? And I’m only the fourth, I think, art editor in a hundred years. So the weight of history was not lost on me. This is quite a responsibility. But on the other hand I try to give a sense in the exhibit of how multi-various The New Yorker cover can be. How it can be interpreted in completely different ways. Because that’s been my other guiding principle for all those decades, is to not let it become predictable.

Anne Quito: I really want to learn more about The New Yorker’s history, of course, but before that, maybe a little detour into your own personal history. I read that you were an architecture student in Paris before coming to New York in 1974, and maybe even before that you were being groomed to take over your father’s plastic surgery practice. Can you take us to those years just before coming to New York?

Françoise Mouly: Yeah, it actually, I think it’s relevant. I mean I wouldn’t have been able to wish for myself the kind of interest that I found in magazines and comics, but it comes from having grown up with a very specific—my dad was a plastic surgeon, my mom was a stay-at-home mom as almost every woman in the fifties was.

And my dad and my mother were very distraught that they had three daughters because that meant that there would be no son to carry on the very traditional ideas. There was little that we could do about it, except that my dad decided that I was going to be the son and I would be the one that would become a surgeon. Which sounded attractive to me. I liked being a garçon manqué when I was a kid. And I looked forward to it up until I became a teenager.

And then I realized, wait a minute, is this really what I want to do? And then I wasn’t so sure anymore because it seemed pretty predestined for me. In France they make you choose between either a scientific or literary path. And it’s pretty radically different, in terms of your baccalauréat and what you have to study.

And I had, up until that moment, been loving literature and theater and I liked my teacher of French and Latin and Greek. And all of a sudden then I had to go to classes, instead of math and physics. So it just created a kind of "is this what I’m really interested in?"

Then, when my parents were in the midst of an acrimonious divorce when I was 15 or 16, I left home. And I was with my boyfriend and I graduated early in a scientific pre-med path. And he was studying architecture and I went to architectural school and I loved it. It was in the École des Beaux-Arts, it was in an old-fashioned studio context. And almost all of our learning was basically being indentured servants to the older students. Basically you would do whatever they told you to do.

We cut the pieces for their models and we did the background for their architectural rendering. But you learned a lot that way. And it was a very physical thing. And it made me realize that process—I recommend it to anybody. It’s great schooling.

So I loved being a student of architecture, and I loved learning as I was making things. We had no formal classes to speak of. Then I ran into the dilemma, especially in the seventies in France, which is I would see older practicing architects come back to—we had also enormous parties—

Anne Quito: Yes. Architects are known for that.

Françoise Mouly: —because everybody works hard. Everybody works on the charette, meaning you have a deadline and you work up till the last minute of the deadline. You stay up for days and nights and when you celebrate, you really partied. And the music was provided by, like, a brass band from Beaux-Arts students and everybody dances all night long. It was exhilarating.

I was in such an old-fashioned part of the school. There were very few women. My interview was one of the few that accepted women. They shaved the first-year students, you could recognize them because the heads were shaved. It really was something. It was intense, but it stopped. It stopped when you graduated. And at that point, every one of the architects that kept coming back to the parties and to the big celebrations were miserable in their professional lives.

In the best scenario you would get to have your own firm. But then being an architect meant that you had to employ about six-to-twelve people and mostly spend all of your time selling the project, talking to the client, changing what you wanted to do to accommodate what the client wanted. It was not just a series of compromises, but it was running a business.

So there was no real way to have the kind of freedom and autonomy that you had as a student. So my dad, who was very stubborn, took me into an operating room. And he said, “It’s not too late to give up,” because he had been distraught that I had gone to the Beaux-Arts. And he just said, “Okay, you can now change your mind.” So he took me as his assistant in the operating room. And I did it just because I was floundering at that point, and it was very well paid.

Anne Quito: I heard that he pioneered a method of breast reduction. Is that right?

Françoise Mouly: Yeah. He pioneered a lot. He pioneered plastic surgery in France because it didn’t exist when he was a young man. It was at the time called plastic and reconstructive surgery. So the reconstructive was to restore people’s faces if they had been mauled by a dog, or in a great burn, or in a car accident.

And that was obviously, ethically, more interesting to me. The only problem is that I walked in, I scrubbed, and put the mask on, and once I was in the operating room, as soon as he took the scalpel and started cutting and blood spewed out, I passed out.

Anne Quito: Oh no!

Françoise Mouly: Just like boom! And he had to stop what he was doing and they had to pick me up off the floor, and revive me, and then scrub again and start again. And then the minute he was back at that moment … Boom! And my dad was furious at me, because how dare I faint? And it went on like this quite a few times until, because he’s stubborn and I’m stubborn and I kept doing it until it stopped.

And then I was in the operating room and he took his scalpel and he cut, and the blood spurted out and you saw the flesh. And he was like, “Françoise, look at this! When are you going to faint?” And nothing. And it made me realize some basic thing about soldiers and surgeons is that in a certain kind of visceral revulsion, physical things that you can’t control, it’s an all or nothing.

You are severed from it, you have no feeling. I kept going into the room and then I would do whatever he was asking me in terms like, “Hand me this, hand me that.” And then he was very happy with me. And we had a weekend. And then on Monday I just went, boom again!

Anne Quito: What age were you?

Françoise Mouly: I was around 18. Something like that.

“I try to give a sense of how multi-various the covers can be. My guiding principle for all these decades is to not let it become predictable.”

Anne Quito: I read that maybe this period, or maybe your architecture training too, prepared you for the heady world of paste-ups.

Françoise Mouly: Well, in a way, yes. Because when I got to the States, it was because I wanted to take a sabbatical from my architectural studies. And to simply take a break. And I thought I would come to the US, not because I was especially in love with the US. I knew nothing. I had a healthy contempt for things American.

But when I landed here, I had no resources, no money. And I discovered New York. And it was exhilarating to be in New York compared to having grown up in Paris, and even having studied in Paris, because I landed first in the YMCA and in Salvation Army, but eventually downtown finding a lot of independent filmmakers and people finding their way.

But my language was really poor. I had been studying English in school, but that didn’t do me any good. And I had made my way in England, but in America it was a whole other accent and I didn’t understand what people said. But the little bit of English that I spoke when I talked to people ... they were really open-minded.

And I took a loft in SoHo, because it was cheap. My roommate was a painter who was earning money as a cook on a tugboat, the first woman cook on the tugboats of New York. Another roommate was doing silkscreen. She was from Oregon, I think, and the way she was earning money was by selling cigarettes. So she introduced me to her boss and, even though I didn’t speak any English, I got a job selling cigarettes.

Anne Quito: Where were you selling cigarettes?

Françoise Mouly: Grand Central Station.

Anne Quito: At Grand Central!

Françoise Mouly: At Grand Central in a booth outdoors. And it was a fascinating sociological experience for me because there were people lining up—everybody smoked at that time. I would say three fourths of the population smoked. We had a wall of those different brands of cigarettes. I took to trying to guess what brand each person smoked. As they approached me, I would look at them in line and I could pinpoint the secretaries, usually with long nails and they smoked more. So often I had my hand on just that pack. In fact, I could reverse engineer the profile of the smoker from looking at them. I wasn’t a hundred percent accurate, but it was a great game. Plus I didn’t have to say anything, I just had to give change.

Anne Quito: So this was in the 1970s.

Françoise Mouly: This is 1974. I arrived on September 2, 1974.

Anne Quito: So very tough in New York, no?

Françoise Mouly: It was very chaotic and incredibly unkempt. It was strange for me because I had expected America to be clean and new. But in New York it was just like everything was filled with garbage and people in the street, but it was also very open-minded.

In Paris I had many interests, but I had a hard time moving around in any milieu other than the very prescribed one that I was in, which was the Beaux-Arts. Whereas in New York, again, just being curious was enough for people to be answering me and giving me jobs and advice.

Anne Quito: So New York may not have been shiny and new, but it was open, you’d say?

Françoise Mouly: Oh, it was absolutely open. And at some point I—again, I was driven by the need to earn money—I was also making models in a Japanese architectural agency. And at some point I asked somebody whether I could apprentice with them. So I was an apprentice plumber and an apprentice electrician. So I would go to people’s houses to change their faucet and wire their new electrical lines.

Anne Quito: From this, I am going to leap to 1994.

Françoise Mouly: Good idea. Good idea.

Anne Quito: Then, in 1994, you get—March, I believe, 1994—you get a visit from Tina Brown.

Françoise Mouly: Actually 1992. In 1992 Tina Brown was nominated as a new editor of The New Yorker, the fourth editor of the magazine. The first woman and the fourth editor. And she knew right away which artist she was going to bring, and she’s a very visual editor. She has said it in interviews and it was true.

She commissioned Ed Sorel for the first cover. She knew she wanted to bring in Avedon as the first-ever to have photographs published in The New Yorker. And she turned to my husband, Art Spiegelman, who had just received a Pulitzer Prize for his work. She came to my office. I had an office where I was publishing my own magazine, which was called Raw.

She came to the office to see Art. And that’s where she met me and I met her. And I showed her some of the magazines and all of the artists that I had been publishing in Raw. And in 1993 she published some comic strips by Art. And she asked him to do covers. And in February, 1993, she published the first cover by Art, which was a Hasid kissing a black woman. And it was a reference to Crown Heights and the riots that were taking place at the time.

And it was a huge ado for anybody who loved the magazine because it was a timely cover, it was a sassy cover, it was grounded in current events, it was begging to be denounced. It was denounced in The New York Times in the editorial, it was denounced in an editorial in the The Washington Post. Like every well-meaning supporter of The New Yorker was outraged that the covers were so in-your-face. And it was denounced on the radio.

And Art is insanely articulate as well as being good with images. He’s also incredibly good with words. So he was giving interview after interview and Tina was delighted. That’s exactly what she wanted. Everybody was talking about this image, for and against, and it was a breath of fresh air.

And that’s when she asked around for recommendations. She knew she wanted to change and get a new art editor because she had inherited Lee Lorenz who had been there under William Shawn and Robert Gottlieb. And she wanted a change.

Anne Quito: So she came to you. I read that you had lunch at the Royalton. Is that right?

Françoise Mouly: You’re well-read!

Anne Quito: I did my research!

Françoise Mouly: Actually, she didn’t come to me right away. I heard about it. She asked Art who mentioned, like, Paul Davis and “real” art directors that he knew. And I heard second-hand or third-hand that she talked to another colleague at The New Yorker who said, “Why didn’t Art mention his wife?” And he told me, “Tina has her eye on you.” And at the time I was very surprised because I wasn’t at all in the world of art direction.

**A portfolio from Mouly’s comics empire**

Anne Quito: When she eventually offered you a staff job, it seemed like being moved from the fringe to this very public, very central role, right? Did you immediately say, “Yes, I want that job”?

Françoise Mouly: It took me by surprise when I heard that she was considering me. My first reaction was like, Why would I want to work for somebody? At that point, I had almost 20 years of being on my own and doing my own magazine and my own publications that I also published. So I had no boss.

And my first reaction was like, Why would I want to work for someone? So the answer was, “No, I don’t want to work for anybody.” But then I realized, Oh, if she’s turning to me, it’s because she knows the results that she wants, but she doesn’t know how to go about it. I realized that it wouldn’t be like being a glorified secretary.

It’s not like she would tell me, “Why don’t you get so and so to do such a thing?” But there was a whole result that she wanted to accomplish. And if she was turning to me, it’s because all she knew about me was Raw, it was based on what I had done as opposed to who I was.

So that became intriguing. And then the next thing I did is I went to the library at The New Yorker and I started looking through—because all I knew of The New Yorker is what she was inheriting, which was a fairly boring and highly predictable magazine that I had not paid any attention to. Certainly not in the graphic arts.

It entirely skips a generation of underground cartoonists whose work I knew and liked. And, I had been publishing Sue Coe, Gary Panter, Charles Burns—none of those people had paid any attention to The New Yorker. So that is what made me realize there’s something I can do here because first of all, I’m being asked based on what I have put out into the world, which was Raw and this kind of work. And second, there is a tradition that is insanely interesting.

The New Yorker is not just what I thought it was. The New Yorker of the early days was a humor magazine and gave pride of place to its artist, which it had stopped doing under the end of Ross. And certainly under William Shawn. It had become a sea of type inside.

But the early magazine, the magazine of the thirties, was actually founded by Harold Ross as a magazine inspired by the French comic weeklies, such as L’Assiette au Beurre and Le Rire. Magazines that I knew very well because that’s something that I wanted to do a book about. And I had bought, as a gift for Art, the entire collection of L’Assiette au Beurre.

Anne Quito: Which translates—is it, um, “a plate of butter”?

Françoise Mouly: Yeah. “The plate of butter.” The plate of butter is a humor magazine from 1910 that was a high spread, that was more highbrow. And also more expensive to buy than the comic weeklies of the time. Beautifully lithographed, beautifully produced and didn’t have the artist in between pages of type. They were entirely visual, and sometimes gave the entire issue to an artist, who could choose his or her theme.

So that kind of visual communication, visual reportage, with the artists not there as decorative “throw pillows,” but as full-fledged contributors who provide their own content was very much what I had done with Raw and was also part of The New Yorker tradition. So I just went, “Oh my God! Yes, this is for me!”

“I’m not trying to please a crowd. I don’t want a consensus. I want [a] visceral reaction.”

Anne Quito: I have a technical question. A lot of people are curious. So The New Yorker has an art department. So there’s you, there’s also a creative director, Nicholas Blechman. There’s also a cartoon editor. How do you work together? Do you overlap?

Françoise Mouly: Considering that The New Yorker at the time I entered it had no visuals. Now it’s a wash with visuals. We have a print magazine and we have a website. And the website, all the stories are illustrated. So Emma Allen’s areas of responsibility—she oversees all the cartoons, whether they’re on the website or in print, and she deals with the cartoonists.

Nicholas Blechman is dealing with a lot of The New Yorker out there, in, in the ways that it’s represented. There’s a whole crew of other people who do the specific illustrations for the website or the illustration for the text pieces.

There’s photo. We publish a lot of photos and have quite a few people we’re dealing with, you know, the photos we commission as well as the photos that we use.

Anne Quito: Oh yes, of course.

Françoise Mouly: I specialize in the cover because it’s all narrative. The cover is not necessarily tied to what’s inside and everybody, myself included, pretty much has to get things approved by the editor, David Remnick. He oversees the cartoons that are published, the covers that I proposed to him, and so on.

Anne Quito: Françoise, I did this exercise yesterday. I went to the School of Visual Arts Library and I picked up this binder that seemed to encompass the moment you started. And this particular one was labeled, like, February or December 1992. And the very first one is Art’s cover, the one that courted a lot of controversy, and then I spread it out on the table. And there is Sue Coe, finally, Ed Sorel, Benoît van Innis. There’s George Booth. There’s Saul Steinberg. Just an incredible array. And I was trying to find it, I wonder when she started? My question is, what was the first cover that you commissioned?

Françoise Mouly: It didn’t work that way. Once Tina set her sights on me, and once I realized I am interested, I put together a proposal: here is what I would want to do with the covers and visual narrative inside. And she asked me to lunch at the Royalton. And I had to get a whole new wardrobe. I wasn’t used to “lunching.” For me it was “uptown” because it was in Midtown.

And she took it for granted that I was working for her. She was eager for fresh air. And so I actually, even at lunch, like the one question I remember from her, which made me realize that I would like working for her is, “Do you have a good babysitter?” Because she knew that mattered.

And I had very young kids. My son was only a year and a half. And of course if I could have said, “Oh, why don’t you call me in a year or two?” But it wasn’t an option. But it did matter obviously, that I could count on somebody good. And right after lunch, she had me come back to the office and I was literally sitting on the floor in the corridor next to Chris Curry for the remaining time.

I eventually inherited an actual job with a title and the office, the corner office, but it took a few months because she had to announce it. She had to give notice to Lee Lorenz. I had a fantastic corner office, but my office wasn’t in place until much later that spring.

Anne Quito: Do you still recall the very first cover you worked on?

Françoise Mouly: Well, yeah, All of them. Because it’s not like a cover a week. When I met with Lee Lorenz he told me, “Okay here’s how you do your job.” And he explained to me that everything comes in the mail and you have the assistant—his assistant became my assistant—so you have Ann Hall separate what comes in between the preferred and the rest. The rest, you don’t look at.

The preferred—you open the envelope and anything that’s cover art, you put in a pile. One day a week on “Look Day,” you go to Tina’s office with a pile of all those things that came in. And then if she says “yes,” you put it on the right. And if she says “no,” you put it on the left. And that’s the job!

Anne Quito: Did you follow that?

Françoise Mouly: Of course not! Of course not. That led to the kind of predictable, repetitive style, house style, that was a recipe for repeating yourself. Because artists would see what was published and they would do something similar and then it got put in the pile and then, you know.

So in the pile, obviously as soon as I could get to do it my way, I established my own system. My system consisted first of all, I opened all the mail that was addressed to me and to The New Yorker, so I stopped this thing of preferred and not preferred. And as a matter of fact, I brought in a lot of artists that had never been published in The New Yorker, such as Bruce McCall, Iain Faulkner, Harry Bliss, Mark Ulriksen, some of which I found in the unsolicited pile.

I just met with people. I looked at portfolios. And I kept very few of the Lee Lorenz pile. I did keep George Booth. I kept Benoît van Innis who had come to me years before showing me his work, and I said, “Eh, it’s not for me. Why don’t you go to The New Yorker?” But now that I was at The New Yorker, he was published under Gottlieb, so it was fine.

I returned a lot of artworks that had been put aside by Lee Lorenz, and mostly I started doing a few things. First of all, I wouldn’t go to Tina’s office. I did it once, trying to show her things, but then there were other people around and then she started asking like, “Oh, and Joe, what do you think?” And it—

Anne Quito: —It became a committee?

Françoise Mouly: Exactly. It became a committee. And I said, “Oh no, not for me.” Because then, Joe would say, “Oh, why don’t we try it in blue?” And then Harry would say, “Oh no, I think it’s better in green.” And so on. And it was like, “Ah, forget it.” Once, never again.

Because again, I wasn’t used to working for somebody. So from that point on, I pretty much created my own Look Day when I was ready by choosing the images, orchestrating them, putting them on the wall, and just bringing Tina down and closing the door. And anybody that she was trying to bring in, I would just say, “No, just you and I.”

And I said, it was a legitimate need—“I need to see you react to an image. I don’t care what other people think.” And I still have a version of this with David Remnick, where afterwards I want to be able to show things to him. To just him. Because I read the speed of his response—if he laughs, if he doesn’t laugh, how he looks at things. This is all the information I need to know.

And I will not show him something if it’s not ready to be looked at. Like I’ll ask the artist to clarify their thoughts. He looks at the cartoons with other people in the room, so he gets a kind of consensus. With the covers, I don’t want a consensus. I want his visceral reaction.

After that because he asked, and he’s totally free, of course, to go around and he tries to see whether he has consensus. And sometimes he’ll change his mind because he loved it, but it didn’t work that well with other people. But still for me, I’m not trying to please a crowd. I’m trying to please him. I’m trying to get a reaction out of him. And I want the image to be clear.

Anne Quito: I spoke to Barry Blitt this weekend, your long-time collaborator. He says, “Every time Françoise calls, I need to be alert, or as alert as I can be in whatever state.” And he said, “We have this thing. She always says, ‘Don’t edit yourself.’” I’m thinking, Wow, she has a direct link to your brain or to this fount of ideas and to this genius or perversity or everything else. And he said, “Sometimes I sit around here thinking, ‘What would make Françoise laugh? Or what would get a reaction?’” I wonder what this ‘don’t edit yourself’ guideline means, and why do you ask that of your artists?

Françoise Mouly: Partly because of my belief that the power of those images is not just that they are beautiful, but it is that they represent an emotion and the artist’s reaction to what we are living through. And I want her to be true to herself. I want her to not try to please me or try to make me laugh or whatever, not try to elicit that emotion out of me, but to be true to how she’s reacting to this topic.

And because I’m dependent on them sending a lot of sketches and a lot of ideas. I don’t produce any of this, so I have to encourage everybody to send things. And if they’re all going to sit around and say, “Okay, here are 25 sketches, what are the best three that I can send to Françoise?”

They don’t know. And I want to see them all because often I’ll be able to come up with the right thing at the right time by simply having like huge archives of things that people have sent. And I’ll be able to, case in point, Anita Kunz had sent me a sketch of the Supreme Court with Trump and I thought it was a great idea. When it came it wasn’t the moment when we published it.

But we did—I gave her an okay—and we did publish it at the time of the Republican Convention last year. And it was perfect because it didn’t talk about the attempt on Trump’s life or like everything that was in that moment, the things that everybody was pursuing, but it was that visceral fear of, Oh my God, we’re entering a world where this is made in the image of the inside of Trump’s psyche.

“‘The New Yorker,’ at the time I entered it, had no visuals. Now it’s a wash with visuals.”

Anne Quito: Anita Kunz is the first person I interviewed for this podcast, and she speaks about you with such regard. She even told the story of the Manhattan Mohawk, this legal battle. And she says, “Françoise is remarkable. She was behind me.” And I think it was traumatic for her in a way that she’d second guessed herself. A little background: So this was published and someone had said, hey, that’s my idea. And then you went through a legal procedure with her. It was time consuming for everyone and emotionally difficult. But she says that you stood behind her throughout.

Françoise Mouly: Of course I would. The artists stand behind us, collectively. I think one thing that I wanted to do with the exhibit is pay tribute to the artists collectively. What a massive creative force. I am so deeply appreciative that those people exist and are still doing this quixotic thing of doing a cover for a magazine.

It used to be that cartoonist was a well-paying, well-respected gig that illustrators, that artists could aspire to. And that was true for the covers at the time. There would be a “look day” and they would make the rounds in New York City, of New York magazines. So they would show things to The New Yorker first, and then things that The New Yorker kept, they would take the rest in their portfolio and then they would go to any of the other magazines that published cartoons, including Reader’s Digest.

Anne Quito: Coming out of this gem of an exhibition—really, it’s very small, but very dense—the affection between you, The New Yorker and the artists really shines through. One of my favorite parts is this mini Salon des Refusés, this wall—

Françoise Mouly: You’re absolutely right. You put your finger on it. This is a bulletin board that I took from my office where I recreated what is a life source of what I do. It’s not what’s published, it’s what’s not published is really the “compost” that makes everything else grow.

And it is that free-flow of ideas, as they occur. I do tell Barry, “Oh you know, think of me as your shrink.” Don’t try to narrow it down to just what I can use because it can come from left field. And I remember thanking Ana Juan for a bunch of sketches—an artist who also has been contributing for years—and I was apologizing that her work was not picked for that week, and thanking her for sitting down and sending so many different ideas.

And she was saying, “But no, but it’s good for me because when something horrendous happens in the news,” says Ana, “I love when you ask me to think about it because it forces me to first look at—a nuclear disaster, or whatever it is that has happened—and then I have to ask the question of what do I feel? How am I reacting to this? I’m not just portraying it, how do I reprocess this into an image?”

And I think that’s what the readers appreciate. That, unlike a photo, even when it’s dealing with contemporary events, or it’s something that the artist has experienced and wanted to communicate to a reader, and we have readers that actually read and react and see those images, and that we don’t have to level everything down to a lower common denominator. It’s directly the artist being in communication with readers and viewers.

It’s fantastic because it’s an antidote to the flood of images. I think everybody at this point in time is flooded with hundreds of images. And they come at you—some of them are ads and they’re trying to manipulate you. They’re kind of propaganda. And so The New Yorker covers have that. Few of them are actually from a person talking to another person.

Anne Quito: Before I move on to my last question, I want to ask about a very famous cover that we will never see in print. This past presidential election, you had prepared a beautiful portrait of Kamala Harris by Kadir Nelson. And I read in the exhibition that we refuse to have a second one on standby. Is that right?

Françoise Mouly: Yeah. It’s not that I refused. It is just that I have learned—everything that I know, I have learned by trial and error. I didn’t go to school for it. Nobody taught me. And I’ve learned to trust my gut. On so many fronts. Like I don’t know a lot of American culture and rather than be an expert, I think that my ignorance is an asset here.

Because if I get it, it reaches pretty deep. Even though I didn’t grow up with the same TV shows and the same points of references, but by being an outsider in a way I can use my own ignorance to ensure that things ‘cut’ and not just superficial.

And similarly a lot of instances when we don’t have a cover—because David killed whatever it is that it was—I literally have to stop breathing. Like I just can’t keep going because, you know, it’s my responsibility and nobody is going to solve that but me until I find something that proves. But on the other hand, I can’t prepare things in advance because they wouldn’t have the veracity of this moment.

So the week before, David asked me, like, “Okay, of course we are all hoping that Kamala is going to be elected. Is there a plan B in case she’s not?” And I could imagine the gut reaction at the election of the first black woman president. That made sense to me. And I talked to Kadir Nelson, we launched into three weeks of paintings and it was a historic moment. One could project hope into that moment.

I couldn’t imagine what it would be to have that hope dashed. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. So I heard David and I said, “I’ll try.” And I put together a number of proposals, none of which he approved. One of them was actually like, What if we run a non-post-election cover? What if we run just like a Fall cover?

Anne Quito: Radical!

Françoise Mouly: That’s a statement in and of itself. Like, I would’ve done it, but because that’s what I felt is that the last thing in the world you will want to have is any kind of heroic portrait of Trump to match the one of Harris. Or yet one more Trump.

I gave him those options, but he didn’t approve anything. And then he asked me again over the weekend before the election, and he asked me on Monday, and he asked me on Tuesday. But I didn’t have anything really worked out. I was given a lot of conflicting information.

Some people said, we may not get the results until Friday. Some people said it may be known right away that Kamala has been elected. The conventional wisdom is that it would be a protracted battle and that would eventually decide, a la, what we lived through with George Bush versus Gore, where it went on for three weeks and it had to be decided by the Supreme Court. But there wasn’t a sense that we would know that night.

But it happened that evening. Everybody was at the office and all I had been working on, because there were a number of issues that needed to be solved with Kadir Nelson because there were so many different people and portraits. And everything has to go through the checkers and there was a massive amount of work on that image.

So we were working on it with Genevieve Bormes, who is my assistant, literally until the last minute. And I walked into the war room—we were all at the office late at night—and I was hearing and feeling, more and more bad portents. And at that point, David Remnick turned to me and said, “So what is plan B?”

So you know, I had to rush back to my desk. And at that time I turned to some things that I had received from Barry. And also because we have a good working relationship and we are on the same frequency. We know more or less when—and it’s not always the case, but there are moments where, you know, political cover and it’s often I turn to him, but not always just to him.

But in any case, at that moment, I took the sketch that he had done. Which had to do with basically black-on-black silhouette because when thinking of something too big to fathom, that’s where his mind had gone.

Anne Quito: It recalls your cover for 9/11, with you and Art.

Françoise Mouly: Yes. Yes. The black-on-black cover for 9/11. So I understood what he meant, but we weren’t going to do a black-on-black cover for that moment. But I took that silhouette and isolated it and just got in touch with him and I said, “Can you do this kind of rough thing quickly? I need something just in case Trump is elected.”

And he said, “How quickly do you want that?”

And I said, “Do it really small. And I want it now.”

And he thought I was going to say, “Tomorrow.” But I said, “I want it now.”

It was like nine o’clock at night. And I said, “Do something very gestural. You’ve done Trump so often, you don’t need any detail. I just wanted to feel that it was done quickly because there’s an immediacy.” I said I’d blow it up because it’s a trick that every designer knows that you enlarge a small sketch and it has graphic immediacy, but it also gives you that sense of Oh, I couldn’t wait to show you this!

It actually is readable that something was done quickly. It was the direct opposite of the loving portraits that Kadir Nelson had done. I remember saying to Barry, and I wanted to feel like, you know, you just produced this, like, “Uuuuugh!”

Anne Quito: Like he just vomited it?

Françoise Mouly: Yeah, exactly. So those were my instructions to the artist. Just vomit it! And he did!

Anne Quito: He told me, “I might’ve been on two Ativans at that point, but I want to be as alert as possible.” He got it! My very last question—a hat tip to the theme of this podcast. I live in Spain and I’ve spent the last five weeks teaching at the School of Visual Arts. But I’ve been walking around and the most interesting—or maybe sad—thing I noticed is that most newsstands now sell iPhone chargers. Or iPhone batteries. Or Tylenol.

Françoise Mouly: Or water.

“If she was turning to me, it’s because all she knew about me was ‘Raw,’ it was based on what I had done as opposed to who I was. So that became intriguing”

Anne Quito: Water. And I arrived the week of your hundredth anniversary and I’m like, “I’m going to get it!” So I scoured the whole city and then I think I picked up an iPhone charger. So, big question, I still know none of this New Yorker anniversary issue with I think six incredible versions of Eustace Tilley. So my question to you: I heard you say print will endure forever—so to those who doubt this notion and to those who puzzle with newsstands turning into mini Best Buy dispensaries, why do you think print isn’t dead?

Françoise Mouly: Well, you know, it’s worked for me specifically, so I’m extrapolating from my personal experience. It was a raft for me. Like at the time where I was lost in a world of possibilities, I found something. Which is conceiving of something, imagining it, and then you can make it happen, and then you get it printed and then you get it in the hands of people who read it.

It’s incredibly accessible and it creates a bond. And it’s true for the magazine. Many of my much younger colleagues will still be seen in the subway reading the print version of the magazine. Yes, I know that The New York Times has managed to make a transition, but we are not, The New York Times. The New York Times, whatever they publish today is not going to be that interesting to read tomorrow, or in six days, or in six months, or in 60 years.

But what is in The New Yorker is specifically designed to be just as interesting to read tomorrow, or next week, or in six years, or in 60 years. We are spending an entire year giving an example of “here’s a piece from the archive.” It’s fascinating. And if there’s a profile, yes, it’s outdated in terms of its facts, but it’s not outdated in terms of its writing. And it has literary quality.

It’s true for our cartoons. It’s just as funny, sometimes funnier, than it was many years ago. And I think this is a discipline where if you put something in print, it’s graven. And it’s there to last. And you hesitate before you send something to the printer. You look at it with a degree of attention that is tremendously more onerous than what you put on a website.

Because if you make a mistake, you can correct it on the website. You can crowdsource the answer by updating it as people tell you, “No, it wasn’t that year, it was this year.” But if you have something printed, it is grave, and important, and for the record.

And I ran into somebody who said, “Oh, I still have the print subscription because I put it on the coffee table and it impresses the chicks.” Yes, okay. It sounds silly, but it is an important part of how the New Yorker is a club to which you belong. If you are reading the New Yorker, you are advertising that you are joining a club of people who are reading long pieces, serious pieces, and you don’t get that with a website.

Nobody’s going to say, “Oh, I have the New Yorker app on my phone” because it impresses anybody. There’s a kind of quality of attention that is honored by those who produce a magazine and by those who read a magazine, that is a kind of funnel where it becomes really important.

I am at odds with a lot of my colleagues because what they want to do is blur a distinction between what’s in print and what’s on the website. I understand the goal because, on a practical business, print is much cheaper to publish on the website than to publish in print.

But I think it is killing the goose with the golden eggs. There’s an attachment of the subscribers. We never had a presence on the newsstand. It was minuscule even when I started 30 years ago. The New Yorker is actually a habit. You get it. What used to be a liability, which is the copies that pile up at the foot of the bed.

Anne Quito: I have that! I have it here. My gosh, I’ve been here for a month! I have a whole stack!

Françoise Mouly: Fantastic! Exactly. That is the best discipline for us. Because we know that if you’re publishing something on the website, again, it’ll be gone by tomorrow. But what is at the foot of your bed, somebody is going to read it at any time, including in the future. And it better be good because it needs to fit the standard of the printed New Yorker.

And I think it’s a huge asset you wouldn’t be able to invent. It’s a complex system and it needs the readers at least as much—and the reader’s respect for the magazine—at least as much as the magazine needs the input from the subscription.

You know, the fact checkers—we have, what, like 18, 28 fact checkers. It’s an incredible job that they do. Incredible. Like they not only do, they re-do all of the work that the journalists have done, that the writers have done. It’s unbelievable. And they check the covers and they check everything. I love that that’s at the core of the magazine. But also, it’s a dedication and it's serious—even if it’s a dedication to make you laugh, that is important.

Anne Quito: They fact check jokes, I read, as well.

Françoise Mouly: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Anne Quito: Well, Françoise, for someone who, like many, lives with a stack of New Yorkers, thank you for having such a big role in making a beautiful object to live with.

Françoise Mouly: Thank you. Thank you so much for the interview. That was great.

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