Art Spiegelman on creating "Ground Zero" cover for The New Yorker
Art Spiegelman, September 23, 2001
"The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." -H.P. Lovecraft
Everyone around the world with access to a television set saw the cataclysmic destruction of the World Trade Center towers, saw it in constant replay, burning- and burning itself into our collective retina. I saw it that way too, but first saw it unmediated. On September 11th my wife (Francoise Mouly, the art editor of The New Yorker) and I had just stepped out of our lower Manhattan home. Those towers had been our taken-for-granted neighbors, always picture-postcard visible a mile south of our front stoop even on gray days. That morning, out of the very clear, very blue sky, a plane roared right over our heads and smashed into the first tower. The scale of the disaster was at first unclear: as many have since observed, it seemed "surreal"- and we had to get over our stunned disconnect to realize that this was no movie, and that our fourteen year old daughter, Nadja, was in the heart of the growing pandemonium.
Nadja is a freshman at Stuyvesant High School, right below the towers. (It's now a triage center for rescue workers.) A half-hour after the first blast we had made our way into the lobby of the school to find her. It took an hour to locate her among the 3500 disoriented students in the ten-story building. Some of her classmates had parents who worked in the towers, some had seen bodies falling past their windows. While we were there the building momentarily lost its power and shook as the South tower crumbled right outside. We got Nadja out a few minutes before the whole school decided to evacuate and made our way home on the promenade alongside the Hudson. We turned back to see the North tower tremble. The core of the building had burned out, and only the shell remained-shimmering, suspended in the sky-before ever-so-slowly collapsing in on itself. Francoise shrieked "No!…No!…No!…." over and over again. Nadja cried out: "My school!" while I stared slack-jawed at the spectacle, not believing it real until the enormous toxic cloud of smoke that replaced the building billowed toward us.
We began planning how to get uptown to get our ten-year old son, Dash,
out of the United Nations school he attends. We stopped at home long enough
to retrieve some phone messages and heard, with relief, the voices of
some friends who lived under the towers and who we had feared dead. Among
the messages were several from The New Yorker, telling Francoise to make
contact, that a new magazine, with a new cover, had to be put together
in the next three days. That too seemed surreal.
Whenever I walk north in the hours and days that have followed, I turn
back-as if toward Mecca- to see if my buildings are still missing. Not
especially well-equipped to help in the search for survivors, I applied
myself to searching for an image of the calamity. Despite what felt like
the irrelevancy of the task, it gave me a way to fend off trauma and focus
on something. It has been hard and painful reconciling to the new emptiness.
I wanted to see the emptiness, and I wanted to find the awful/awe-filled
image of all that disappeared that morning.
From photos, I began drawing the buildings that still made up the lower Manhattan skyline, with a giant shroud draped over the shape of the two missing towers that once loomed above them: an ominous black shape hovering in a preternaturally blue Magritte sky. My disquieting peaceful blue sky seemed to mock the gravity of the situation, but I couldn't let go. Francoise suggested that I desaturate the colors and I fiddled with my computer's scanned-in sketch. The drawing only made sense when I obliterated it by turning the whole screen black-indeed, almost everyone I talked to suggested a black cover over the next day or so. It sounded good in words, but visually it was only an acknowledgement of defeat and the inadequacy of images. In desperation I suggested that the cover be a black silhouette of the towers against a field of black-a version of the inadequate picture I was struggling to make when the color was all but completely drained out. I passed this on to Francoise who understood that I'd found the solution. I kept wrestling with my first image for another full day just to try to resolve it. (That version was published in a French and Italian magazine.)
Françoise proceeded to work with the head of The New Yorker's pre-press department, to figure out how to print their cover so that the background would be neither a mere gray nor so dark as to completely extinguish the buildings. To my everlasting admiration, she repositioned my silhouettes so that the North Tower's antenna breaks the W of the magazine's logo.
The New Yorker cover that can really only be seen in its printed form. In a sense, like an etching, the magazine's printed cover is the only possible "original." Those silhouetted towers were printed in a fifth black ink on a field of black made up of the standard four-color printing inks so that the ghost image lingers, insisting on its presence through the blackness. I began by channeling Magritte, but in the end had to turn to Ad Reinhardt's black on black paintings to locate Ground Zero.
-© art spiegelman, September 23, 2001. nyc
