The 100th anniversary of the 'New Yorker' in 10 iconic covers

BarcelonaA century of journalism goes a long way and the New Yorker has more than fulfilled its promise: in addition to its eminently cultural articles of great depth, there are tens of thousands of jokes that have redefined the comic strip genre as a social commentary, and all of this has been served up wrapped in exquisite covers that have often ended up becoming iconic. Taking advantage of the publication's centenary, we review some of these historic first pages.

The first and original: a dandy looking at a butterfly through his monocle, evoking with a touch of irony the phlegmatic observation of the upper class on reality. The figure was born without a name, but was later baptized as Eustace Tilley and has become a kind of human mascot of the publication. When February comes, the New Yorker usually takes advantage of the birthday to have him appear again on a cover, adapted to the view of the artist of that week and to current political or social events.

The magazine's beginnings coincide with the processes of women's emancipation and waves of feminism. A good number of covers reflect this incorporation into tasks normally reserved for men and often exuded the idea that a woman, in a certain context, was already per se A funny idea. One of those ambiguous covers is Abner Dean's, in which a blonde woman reads a deep book, wedged between two older men who have the newspaper spread out.

The painter Constantin Alajálov, born in Armenia and later naturalized as an American, left some eighty covers in the weekly, between 1926 and 1962. One of the most remembered is this one, published during the height of the Second World War, in which the global symbol of solidarity and resistance is expressed.

Nightlife scenes in the city have also been featured on numerous covers, especially during the first third of the magazine's history. Arthur Getz was one of the most famous cartoonists of the New Yorker, to which he devoted fifty years of his career, between 1938 and 1988, during which time he published 213 cover images. The novelist John Updike noted "the alert eye and determined brushwork with which he finds endless silent dramas full of contrast and tone in the world around us."

Reproduced a thousand times on posters and postcards, this cover made fun of the self-centered gaze of New Yorkers. The image is titled The world, seen from ninth avenue and simplifies to the extreme everything that lies beyond the confines of Manhattan. The author is Saul Steinberg, who liked to define himself as "a writer who draws." During his career he contributed 85 covers and 642 illustrations, but none of them was as famous as this one, to the point that he regretted that he had been reduced to "that guy on the poster."

Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman signed this cover, published in the wake of racial tensions between the black and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Alongside the drawing, the author wrote a brief comment saying that it had been "dearly naïve" and that he was aware that the conflict would not be erased with a kiss but – taking advantage of the fact that it was Valentine's Day – perhaps it was permissible, even if only for a moment, to close one's eyes and believe that, as the Beatles said, All you need is loveThe cover was met with criticism from both sides.

A black-on-black cover, with the two Twin Towers now only a spectral presence after being demolished in the attacks of September 11, 2001. The illustration is once again by Art Spiegelman, who in this case sought an absolutely sober image, created in collaboration with the person Françoise Mou New Yorker, as she has been its graphic director since 1993 and is therefore responsible for selecting the covers that are published and presenting them to the director, David Remnick.

Roz Chast is one of the coolest and most unclassifiable talents in the New Yorker, where he has worked since 1978 and has managed to insert more than a thousand jokes with a humor that is both homely and eccentric. The illustration captures the changing habits of young people in relation to knowledge: armed with a clipboard, he ignores the books in the gigantic library, which look down at him with a certain apprehension and vital anguish.

The famous Epi and Blai, from the children's program Sesame Street, looking at a screen where the members of the Supreme Court can be seen, embraced. The cover is the work of Jack Hunter, who sent it without being a contributor to the publication but managed to be chosen for the tenderness with which it captured the everyday joy for many people in the face of a new advance in the rights of the LGTBIQA+ community. And he did so by playing with two characters who were often speculated to be just two friends or something more.

Feminist demonstrations inspired artist Abigail Gray Swartz to make this illustration, after attending the marches with her children in mind. From there, she took the classic image known as "Rosie the Riveter," popularized during World War II to vindicate the work of women behind the front during the conflict, altering it in two significant ways: turning her into a racialized woman and making her look like what became known as a pussyhat (which can be translated as a pussy hat), which was a symbol of the protests. In recent years, the costumbrismo is still present, but has increasingly given way to explicit demands.