All the Art That's Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn't): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page »

Jerelle Kraus is the award-winning art director whose thirty-year tenure at the New York Times includes a record thirteen years at Op-Ed. She also worked as an art director at Time and as the art director of Ramparts magazine and of Francis Ford Coppola's City magazine.

The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine have published Kraus's writing, including an "On Language" column that subbed for William Safire. Fluent in four languages, she was educated at Swarthmore and Pomona colleges and at l'École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She received an MA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Fulbright scholarship to Munich. Her Web site is jerellekraus.com.

All the Art That's Fit to Print reveals the true story of the world's first Op-Ed page, a public platform that& mdash;in 1970& mdash;prefigured the Internet blogosphere. Not only did the New York Times's nonstaff bylines shatter tradition, but the pictures were revolutionary. Unlike anything ever seen in a newspaper, Op-Ed art became a globally influential idiom that reached beyond narrative for metaphor and changed illustration's very purpose and potential.

Art director Jerelle Kraus, whose thirteen-year Op-Ed tenure far exceeds that of any other art director or editor, unveils a riveting account of working at the Times. Her insider anecdotes include the reasons why artist Saul Steinberg hated the Times, why editor Howell Raines stopped the presses to kill a feature by Doonesbury's Garry Trudeau, and why reporter Syd Schanburg& mdash;whose story was told in the movie The Killing Fields& mdash;stated that he would travel anywhere to see Kissinger hanged, as well as Kraus's tale of surviving two and a half hours alone with the dethroned peerless outlaw, Richard Nixon.

All the Art features a satiric portrayal of John McCain, a classic cartoon of Barack Obama by Jules Feiffer, and a drawing of Hillary Clinton and Obama by Barry Blitt. But when Frank Rich wrote a column discussing Hillary Clinton exclusively, the Times refused to allow Blitt to portray her. Nearly any notion is palatable in prose, yet editors perceive pictures as a far greater threat. Confucius underestimated the number of words an image is worth; the thousand-fold power of a picture is also its curse.

Op-Ed's subject is the world, andits illustrations are created by the world's finest graphic artists. The 142 artists whose work appears in this book hail from thirty nations and five continents, and their 324 pictures-gleaned from a total of 30,000-reflect artists' common drive to communicate their creative visions and to stir our vibrant cultural-political pot.

Publishers Weekly

The enduring relevance of the New York Times op-ed illustrations are explicated with literary flair by Kraus, a former art director of the page, who contends that the groundbreaking pictures "changed the very purpose and potential of illustrations... to stir the political and cultural pot." Episodic essays accompanied by illustrations re-create the battles between art directors and editors that have raged since the Times created the world's first op-ed page in 1970. The works of famous Times illustrators like Brad Holland and Roland Topor, are enriched by Kraus's presentation of the controversies associated with their publication or rejection. The book serves as a chronicle of late 20th-century history, replete with sardonic images of tyrants and visual commentaries on the fall of communism; the works of Eastern Europeans who fled totalitarian regimes are some of the most challenging and resonant. In this overflowing treasure chest of ideas, politics and cultural critiques, Kraus proves that "art is dangerous" and sometimes necessarily so. 306 illus. (Nov.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

List of Illustrations

Prologue 1

Origins 3

Kiss-Off 5

Upheaval 6

Unfit to Print 9

Combustion 11

The Seventies 13

Ur-Editor Meets Ur-Art Director 15

Local Lights 22

Wunderkind 26

Cows, Guns, Auras 28

The Doctor Draws 30

Squiggly Wit 31

Two Titans 32

Persian Pluck 35

Oceans Away 36

Enfant Terrible 42

Wild Welshman 44

Searle's Sustenance 45

Clannish 46

Up Against the Wall 54

Don't Make Me Think 55

Protecting Fresh Treasure 56

Thumbs Down 63

Changing of the Guard 68

The Lady Editor Done It 70

The Eighties 71

Ready or Not 73

Mental Gymnastics 80

Delicate Daring 83

Unseen, Unsung, Thrilling 84

From Airport to Newsprint 94

In the Family Way 101

Cold War Classics and Memories of Hot 102

Speaking the Unspoken 108

Peerless Outlaw 109

Wild Welshman Worsens 115

George Grosz in Pigtails 117

Legend 118

The Domestic Domain 120

The Irony Curtain 142

Poles Vault 144

Unprintable 153

Taste 161

Tales from Behind the Scenes 161

Wrestling 163

The Nineties 165

A Boost from Bosnia 167

Reprise 175

Nineties Nemesis 180

Howell's Reign 182

The Bride Stripped Bare 186

Feminizing 188

Bling 194

No Way 195

The Gray Lady Graduates 202

Black and "White" 204

Does It Compute? 206

The Rebus Requirement 208

Seismic Break 209

The Aughts 221

Rains Howl 223

Reins Retracted 224

A Little off the Top, Please 234

Glories Still Glitter 241

Once Upon a Time 247

Picture Power 248

Notes 253

Index 257