Art Newsletter No. 42 covers the art and illustrations in the April 9 and April 26 issues of the Review, and it comes to you from the kitchen sink. I’ve always loved the term “kitchen sink.” It can mean a surplus of something, as in “kitchen sink cookies,” which contain pretzels, gummy bears, or whatever’s on hand; or it can mean a kind of working-class realism, as in the “kitchen sink realism” of postwar British dramas, set in cold-water flats and bedsits. I sometimes like to stop and appreciate the random still lifes that form inside my kitchen sink: a marble repository, variously filled with wilted flowers, carrot peels, dirty dishes, and sponges.

The cover of our April 9 issue is a 2023 painting titled Orange Squeeze, by the New York–based artist Rachel Domm. After unintentionally designing two covers in a row that featured paintings of people bundled up, Domm’s cheery, bright depiction of a thumb and finger holding a citrus was a welcome promise of vitamin C, and spring.

For Pablo Scheffer’s review of two books about tennis rivalries, I found a lemon-lime-colored print of a court scene by the artist Leah Horowitz. For an essay by Yi-Ling Liu about the remarkable pace of construction in the city of Shenzhen, I wrote to George Wylesol for an illustration. He sent a clever sketch of a stable reflection of a wobbly cityscape skyline, followed by the colorful final. Romy Blümel sent a crimson-haired Muriel Spark portrait for Miranda Seymour’s essay on a new biography of the Dame, as well as an edition of her letters. For Ben Lerner’s introduction to a new edition of John Berger’s novel G., Adrian Tomine drew a handsome, cigarette-puffing Berger, staring into the middle distance.

I loved reading Dan Rockmore’s essay on four books about the art of mathematics. All the numbers and pebbles he mentioned reminded me of paintings by the artist Jule Korneffel. Her bright pink and green Kaktüsse, featuring thirteen slightly irregular orbs, went perfectly with the piece. On Instagram Korneffel wrote, “Mathematics has always been part of my DNA—my father was a mathematician, and—I believe—his way of thinking profoundly shaped my approach to abstraction. Before words, there were numbers; I experienced them as vivid, distinct fields of color from an early age.”

Laura Breiling is great at packing plot and detail into her portraits, which is why I thought of her after reading Omari Weekes’s review of Tyriek White’s Brooklyn-based novel We Are a Haunting. She drew White surrounded by ghosts in Jamaica Bay. I loved the lines from Gizella Hervay’s poem “Superior Pink Toilet Soap” that Ange Mlinko quotes in her essay about a collection of poetry by Hungarian women. This kitchen-sink-adjacent subject reminded me that the photographer Jason Fulford had visited Hungary in 2000, so I asked him to send some of his work from that trip. He had a wonderful image of women’s hats in a Budapest shop window. The illustrator Karagh Byrne had written me a few times, inquiring about a commission, so I offered her Cathleen Schine’s review of Steve Stern’s novel A Fool’s Kabbalah. She drew a fine-lined Stern sporting a scarf.

The playful, twisty series art, titled “Ductwork,” is by the designer Oliver Munday.

The April 23 issue was our Spring Books issue, and the cover was a sort of whodunit, drawn and lettered by the Paris-based illustrator Fanny Blanc. Her first sketch of a tea party included a naked man gardening outside. We asked her to go a bit further, so her second draft put a body beneath a bush. Blanc wrote to me, “On a table, there are gardening gloves, perhaps repurposed; a shoe lies on the floor; a pot contains a datura plant (for its toxicity, even though it’s not exactly the season, as they normally bloom in early summer).”

For an essay by an anonymous resident of Tehran about the experience of living under siege, we considered some wire images of the city, but at the last minute we opted for something a little less familiar, a painting of rooftops—one of the motifs in the essay—that I did in 2022. (The view is in fact of the Lower East side, not Tehran.)

Francine Prose reviewed two colorful novels, Lee Clay Johnson’s Bloodline and Carl Hiaasen’s Fever Beach, and after reading Prose’s descriptions of the prosthetics, diapers, assault weapons, and sex dolls in the books, I asked the illustrator Paul Davis if he was up for the task.

I hadn’t worked with Jason Kernevich, from the design firm The Heads of State, for a few months, and I wondered what they might do with David Cole’s essay about birthright citizenship. All the sketches they sent in were wonderful, some playing with hospital-issue pink and blue baby blankets, but we went with one that featured infant footprints and post office return stamps. For Hermione Lee’s essay about Virginia Woolf’s letters, I wanted to see what Yann Kebbi might do with Woolf’s famous and fabulous face. He took the job and sent us a wonderfully woeful ink likeness.

Georgie McAusland illustrated Trevor Jackson’s review of two books about retirement. She sent sketches of a protest march made up of senior citizens. I asked Alain Pilon for a drawing of Alfred Tennyson to accompany Kathryn Hughes’s article about Tennyson and science, and he sent a sensitive sketch of the poet. His work increasingly reminds me of drawings by the late Pierre Le-Tan, whose art, along with Jean-Michel Folon’s, inspired me, at age fifteen, to study editorial illustration.

Maybe it was too easy, but I asked an Italian to draw the Italian writer Domenico Starnone for Tim Parks’s review of his newest novel. Andrea Ventura never disappoints, and his rough-hewn likeness of the novelist fell in nicely and unexpectedly with the Kebbi and Pilon. We tucked a new collage by our longtime contributor Lucy Sante into the issue, from a show currently up at the Academy of Arts and Letters.

The series art in the Spring Books issue is titled “Textile Library,” by Ciara Quilty-Harper.