The Art of Vint Lawrence

In its 110 years, The New Republic has never published a better illustrator.

The latest print issue of The New Republic contains my short tribute, on the occasion of TNR’s 110th birthday, to Vint Lawrence (1939-2016), who drew caricatures for the magazine from the 1970s into the early aughts. The link is worth clicking mostly for its samples of Vint’s work. I met Vint during my first tour at the magazine—I’m currently on my third—in the early 1980s. After becoming an editor at The Washington Monthly in 1983 I persuaded Vint, who’d got his start at the Monthly, to resume contributing there. The pitch was that we’d let him draw covers, which for some reason The New Republic seldom did. Drawing cover art offered Vint an irresistible opportunity to work in color. As you can see from the sample reproduced above (from March 1986), Vint made the most of it.

That guy whose head isn’t big enough for a crown is Rep. Jim Wright (D.-Texas). Wright was about to succeed Tip O’Neill as House speaker. The piece’s author, Steven Waldman, thought Tip’s were big shoes to fill, and doubted Wright could fill them. History confirms that judgment. Wright held the job for all of two and a half years before he was ousted. In today’s snake pit of a House, two and a half years may sound like an eternity, but it is not. Wright was defenestrated over a scandal publicized by an ambitious young Georgia Republican named Newt Gingrich. The scandal concerned some questionably generous bulk purchases of a book one Jim Wright had authored. Gingrich would later himself become Speaker—and himself be driven out after four years. The proximate cause was Newt’s mismanagement of the 1998 midterms, but he was also hurt by an ethics investigation that unearthed some questionably generous bulk purchases of a book one Newt Gingrich had authored. Tra la la.

But our subject today is Vint’s gift, not Newt’s hypocracy. Wright had a pair of eyebrows no self-respecting caricaturist could ignore. Note how Vint gives them a sculptural and vaguely Baroque quality. Wright looks like he’s been sitting in a cable-news make-up chair where the makeup artist is Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

My New Republic piece emphasizes Vint’s work for The New Republic, which was his principal venue. You can read that piece here. If you want to read an earlier Vint tribute that I wrote for The Washington Monthly on the occasion of his death in 2016—or, more important, if you want to peruse more of Vint’s gorgeous work—then click here.