Another Indecipherable, Messy, Barry Blitt Drawing

In recent years The New Yorker has favored cover illustrations by Barry Blitt, a Canadian-born illustrator of uncertain origins. When his stuff was new and fresh (this is going back a couple of decades), it had novelty, as though he were passing off notebook scribbles and watercolor-board tests as finished product. Many years later he still hasn’t learned to draw, or he’s convinced himself and his art editors that his awkward, unfinished, unrealized renderings are his “style.”

His covers for TNY are always murky or ambiguous in intent. Apparently this is supposed to beDonald Trump as a beauty pageant contestant (October 10, 2016 cover).

But if Trump were a 20-year-old female in a pageant, would he (she) not look more like Tiffany Trump, or Ivanka? What exactly is the point here, other than a glancing allusion to an ephemeral news item that will be long forgotten by the time the nominal cover date arrives?

What indeed? Murkier than ever!

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Author: Moderator has moderated nycforum.org since 2016.