The website of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, lists a watercolor by Richard Taylor. It is described as a New Yorker magazine cover from 1937. That is very nearly correct. As the handwritten magazine logo suggests, this is actually, in publishing parlance, a rough. Taylor projected a September 1937 publication date, but the finished art was actually to run on the cover of the January 9 issue for that year.
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| https://www.albrightknox.org/artworks/rca1939113-art-gallery-new-yorker-magazine-cover |
The cover depicts a woman entering an art gallery and encountering powerful surrealist art. She reacts quite viscerally to the transgressive art on display, experiencing shock, or revulsion, or fear.
Taylor made some important changes between the rough and the finish. He had the disturbing art fill more space on the gallery wall, making the paintings seem more overwhelming to the diminutive woman. Also, Taylor added some benign figures to the foreground. Significantly, they are experiencing the grotesque art calmly, with no apparent squeamishness or sensitivity. Their emotional indifference to the distressing images they regard on the wall stands in contrast to the woman's strong gut reaction.
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| Richard Taylor The New Yorker, January 9, 1939 |
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| Richard Taylor Preliminary art The New Yorker, January 9, 1939 The Albright-Know Art Gallery Buffalo, New York |
Note: This is the first work of preliminary New Yorker art by Richard Taylor I have been able to show on the blog. Readers with other Taylor roughs or finishes are urged to share them here.
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