Barry Blitt’s “Exposed”
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Barry Blitt’s latest cover for the magazine is his fifteenth to feature Donald Trump. (“The gift that keeps on grifting,” in Blitt’s words.) The image of Trump at the lectern, poised nude and cross-legged, recalls the prophet Bob Dylan, who once noted, in “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” that “even the President of the United States must sometimes have to stand naked.” Blitt sends sketches to the magazine each week; this one was chosen from a batch that included riffs on school shootings and the death of Stephen Hawking. Once the image was selected, Blitt honed the cast and contour of certain love handles, then glazed the work in his signature watercolors.
“I wanted to address President Trump’s stormy relationship with the press,” Blitt said. (“I can definitely describe his junk perfectly,” Stormy Daniels said, of her own relationship with Trump.) Blitt is not the first New Yorker illustrator to take as fodder the pas de deux between press and President, especially in times of scandal. In 1998, a few weeks after news broke of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, Art Spiegelman, my longtime collaborator, drew the President ringed by a lowered group of microphones:
Spiegelman’s sketch was initially rejected, before being accepted by the magazine a week later. At that point, several thousand issues had already been printed, and the presses were stopped to accommodate the last-minute change. Clinton, near-faceless, is fully clothed, but holds what Dylan might call a “fool’s gold mouthpiece.”
