New Yorker Cover Artist Gretchen Dow Simpson: 1939 -2025
Sad news reached the Spill yesterday of the passing of Gretchen Dow Simpson. Ms. Simpson, who was 85, contributed 58 covers to the magazine from August 19, 1974 to June 7, 1993.
During the mid-to-late 1970s when I began examining, cover-to-cover, each and every issue of The New Yorker, I became an instant fan of her art. I found Ms. Simpson’s work to be a perfect example of the magazine’s embrace of a wide graphic landscape. She was perhaps The New Yorker‘s most architecturally minded cover artist; the subject matter usually focused on interesting intersections of lines, angles, and light. Her cover art was serene, never screaming from the newsstands. To me, her work echoed these words from William Shawn:
Here’s her first New Yorker cover:
and here’s her last:
More: