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

By Jerelle Kraus

Columbia University Press

260 pages, $34.95

On September 21, 1970, The New York Times unveiled a new kind of page called the “op-ed,” displacing the obituaries that had long been printed opposite the editorials. This novel forum was open to nonstaff writers—and to freelance artists, who have since supplied thirty thousand or so pictures for the page and for the adjacent letters column. Jerelle Kraus, a Times veteran of three decades, served as art director for the page from 1979 to 1993. And in this generously illustrated volume, she shares the work of 134 of those artists. She also provides an intensely personal history of the page as it weathered tempests and tinpot tyrannies at the Times. Her deepest loyalty, of course, is to her artists, who set the tone of seeming ferocity: headless figures, rude caricatures, grotesque animals. These images gave the op-ed page its air of radicalism, although, as Kraus observes, “since no one knew for sure what [the art] meant, it couldn’t be proved controversial.” Most of the drawings that were censored—and Kraus offers an assortment of them—were killed on grounds of taste. Male editors were given to seeing faux breasts and phalluses, or took politically correct offense at innocent drawings. Meanwhile, a female editor, Charlotte Curtis, vetoed David Levine’s nude Kissinger because it made the globetrotting diplomat look too fat. In any case, a glance at the current, slicker version of the Times op-ed page shows that those rampant days are gone. “No cultural movement,” Kraus concludes, “survives long beyond its initial impetus.”

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