It's the "what if" cover — the image that the New Yorker planned to run if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election.
This week, the magazine decided to go public with the illustration, which now accompanies editor David Remnick's forthcoming article, "Hillary Clinton Looks Back in Anger" — one day after her campaign memoir, "What Happened," was released.
The image, by French artist Malika Favre, is titled "The First," and depicts a historic President Hillary Clinton gazing at the moonlight from the would-be viewpoint of the Oval Office. Now, alongside Remnick's piece, the artwork, of course, takes on an entirely different tone — not of history, but of the poignancy of the hypothetical.
"That image brings everything back to me in a flash," New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly said. "The night of the election, I was at the office late, hard at work with final retouching on [Favre's] image. I was focused on the technical details, getting the face just right, and on the layout."
"I was trying not to tune in the results coming in. I had not prepared anything else," continues Mouly, who launched a cartoon newspaper called Resist in response to President Donald Trump's victory. "Eventually the sense of dread that crept among the few colleagues still in the office eventually overwhelmed me, and I left."
"I remember going to bed with a feeling of relief, pride and excitement and waking up the next day to intense disappointment," Favre recounts of election night. "It was frustrating on all counts."
The artist notes that the artwork can be read on multiple levels. "There is that moment of glory of seeing her standing in the Oval room at night," the artist says of the Clinton figure, "but also that feeling of anticipation and almost loneliness that I wanted to convey. A little bit like a 'What now?' moment."
Mouly salutes the lasting power of Favre's image, even when cast in a different historic light.
