The New Yorker celebrates its 100th anniversary by displaying its drawn covers

“When I started, I didn’t know much about The New Yorker , so I went to the bookstore and looked at the covers from the 1930s or 1940s,” says Françoise Mouly, the magazine’s art director since 1993 and curator of the exhibition. “I didn’t just see how people dressed or what the cars looked like, but it was amazing how it gave me a sense of what it was like to be alive at that time, the prejudices or what made people laugh, just the whole subtext of what a culture is, and I realized that the magazine offers a portrait of our time.”

There are covers that describe an era, like the Mona Lisa who refuses to be photographed. In the gallery, there are several that tell a story of the current events in a different way. There is Gurbuz Dogan Eksioglu's work entitled Erased , in which the face of Osama bin Laden is blurred after his death, or Art Spiegelman's Downhill, in which the microphones are directed at President Bill Clinton's crotch in the midst of the crisis over his sexual affair with the intern Monica Lewinsky, or Barry Blitt's The Politics of Fear, in which the Obamas appear in their first electoral campaign, Barack with a turban and Michelle, as a terrorist, with a rifle hanging.

A painted world. “Our strength is what we don’t do,” says Mouly. “We don’t put photographs like other magazines, or celebrities, and we don’t link the cover to the content inside, we don’t pretend to illustrate the main article or tell the artists what to paint. The editor doesn’t impose the theme, it’s an idea generated by the artists,” he insists.

This has been the compass of a publication renowned since its origins “for its precision and clarity,” says David Remnick, its director. Its fact checking is legendary in the profession.

And yet its beginnings were not easy, and even its co-founder and first director, Harold Ross, came close to losing everything in a poker game 100 years ago. Ross, a true adventurer born in Aspen (Colorado), the son of a silver miner and a teacher, left home as a teenager and worked in a series of newspapers, until he served in Europe during the First World War, where he collaborated with the American military newspaper Stars & Stripes. Shortly before the armistice, in Paris, he met the journalist Jane Grant, whom he married, although she confessed that he was “the ugliest man she had ever met”. Impressed by the so-called French humor magazines, they decided to found their own once they returned to New York.

“It is a tradition that began 100 years ago, when magazines were the main means of visual communication. In Europe, I had seen these covers illustrated by artists like Juan Gris. They started their magazine with artists as kings,” says Mouly. It would be a few years before the greatest writers found shelter in these pages.

Ever since that first issue in February 1925, which failed to live up to expectations of offering “joy, wit and satire”—Ross and Grant considered buying a large number of copies to give the impression that it had worked, but backed out for financial reasons—the magazine has had a recurring presence, in addition to its identifying name, a quip by Broadway press agent John Toohey. No one worried that there had already been a The New Yorker .

In that founding issue, published in the Jazz Age in Manhattan, illustrator Rea Irvin set a distinctive style with the typography of the logo and a cover that has been repeated on each anniversary as the DNA of the magazine. Irvin created Eustace Tilley, the face of The New Yorker .

“Basically, it’s an image of sophistication. Someone with a top hat, a monocle and a turned-up nose looking at a pretty butterfly, an inconsequential butterfly. Irvin was very clever in finding an image that expressed the desire for a sophisticated look at the world and, at the same time, made fun of himself,” Mouly says. “It was a sense of humour where, being serious and dedicated to what you do, you don’t take yourself too seriously,” he adds.

Tilley appeared as such on all the magazine's birthdays, until, in the nineties, artists were commissioned on each occasion to make a new version. In the last issue, Tilley reappeared as such, but other covers were included. In the digital issue, Javier Mariscal was one of those chosen to make a review of this identifying face. Ana Juan, Sergio García or Diego Mir are other Spaniards who have made covers of the magazine.

Ross (who died in 1951) was succeeded as editor by William Shawn (1951-1987), Robert Gottlieb (1987-1992) and then Tina Brown. “The magazine was highly respected, but it was resting on its laurels,” Mouly says. Brown caused an earthquake. The covers, defined as an oasis of peace, were changed. Although they remained independent of the content, the new editor wanted to reflect everyday events. The cover of a Hasidic man kissing a black woman (Valentine's Day, 1993, by Spiegelman (Mouly's husband) caused consternation.

“She liked controversy and people’s reactions, but many readers were furious that she broke the tradition of not giving the front page to news,” he recalls. It was the dawn of another era. When David Remnick took over in 1998, the magazine redefined its distinctive approach, introducing news only when there was something vital to say.

On the wall hangs Madame President , Kadir Nelson’s illustration of Kamala Harris for the cover that never existed last November. Mouly had to improvise. Barry Blitz made a silhouette of Donald Trump: Back with a Vengeance. He asked for “a kind of ‘awugh!’” strokes that conveyed a feeling of vomiting.