Opinion | 12 Art Directors on Bringing the Op-Ed Pages to Life
The New York Times · Steven Heller ·
What does an opinion look like?
In 1970 The New York Times created the Op-Ed page, in part to further clarify the distinction between reportage and commentary or news and opinion. The idea came from the editorial page editor at the time, John B. Oakes. He wanted to create a dedicated space opposite the editorial page (hence the name Op-Ed) where The Times’s freethinking columnists and guest contributors could analyze, critique and otherwise provide personal perspectives on issues of the day. Mr. Oakes pushed the idea for years, but it didn’t come to life until Sept. 21, 1970, with Harrison Salisbury, an eminent foreign correspondent, as its editor. Mr. Salisbury had as his partner Louis Silverstein, The Times’s corporate art director and later one of the paper’s assistant managing editors. Mr. Silverstein, who was already refreshing the paper’s venerable yet musty layouts, envisioned and conceived an art style as novel as the Op-Ed page itself. The mandate was to feature artists and illustrators with distinct personal, interpretive conceptual graphic vocabularies. The art would reject conventional American editorial cartoon labels and captions. It would make readers think with metaphor and allusion, not with mimicry of the text.
When I became art director of the Op-Ed page in 1973, I recognized I owed a debt to Mr. Silverstein and the page’s first art director, Jean-Claude Suares. Mr. Suares forged the template by bringing in artists like Brad Holland to create weekly conceptual drawings on issues and events. (An example is featured below: Mr. Holland’s falling totem of Richard Nixon, signifying the president’s collapse during the Watergate scandal.)
While I continued working with Mr. Suares’s artists, I also believed that it was my job to introduce new forms to the page. For this reason, I brought comics artists into the mix. The Times was not interested in publishing the syndicated comics that appeared in almost every other American newspaper. I believed that ’60s underground comics had the power to evoke a different yet familiar response from the Op-Ed reader. So I started publishing younger cartoonists. As a celebration of these comics, I commissioned Harvey Kurtzman, the founding editor and artist of the original Mad magazine, known for its wacky satire, to contribute an essay on the origins of Alfred E. Neuman, the mascot of the new visual parody I was hoping to instill at The Times.
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