»It keeps me sane to not only do one thing«

Leanne Shapton is as famous for her illustrations and artworks as she is for writing books like Swimming Studies, or her beautiful, artistic love story Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, told through an auction catalog after the couple’s breakup. Juggling her personal work and being the art editor for The New York Review of Books, she still has a lot of passion left for her ongoing fight for illustrators finally getting taken seriously as thinkers too. We talked to the Canadian, who lives in New York, about why abstraction makes things clearer, why painting is like swimming – and her love for German illustrators.

You’re an artist and illustrator, an author and art director, and you also have your own publishing house. How do you introduce yourself when you meet someone?
Leanne Shapton: I just say that I’m Leanne. (laughs) And then it depends on the context. I might say writer, painter or that I have a little publishing company. It’s all fluid, because I wear so many hats.

It’s amazing how you’re balancing writing and painting with a full-time job as art editor.
It keeps me sane to not only do one thing. It’s almost like stretching by doing something else. When I’ve writ­ten for a week, I really have to paint to get looser again.

I couldn’t really figure out how you actually started your career. Was it by writing or by painting?
It’s funny, but I think it started when I worked in a bookstore that’s specialized in art books. I was always a reader and always a looker, and so, all of my inspiration came from verbal and nonverbal places. I was also a swimmer, which was a whole other thing (note: Leanne Shapton participated in the Canadian Olympic trials). First I went to McGill University in Montreal for a year and then to art school in New York, but that wasn’t for me. I quit after four months because I really wanted to intern, to work and get experience.

So where did you get it?
My first job was illustrating for The Globe and Mail and The New York Times Book Review. So again, it had to do with words and pictures. (laughs) I also worked with Jim McMullan who did the theater posters for the Lincoln Center. And at Harper’s Magazine, I got an ed­ucation in really good writing. I saw how the editing ma­chine worked and discovered how a sense of humor and intellect was paired with illustration. But every ­time some­one asks me what I studied, I feel an inferiority com­plex because I didn’t go to university. I really regret that I didn’t because I think I would have a more trained mind in some ways.

On the other hand, you seem very determined. You not only quit art school, even though you had a scholarship, but also your job as art director for the opinion section of The New York Times when you weren’t allowed to sit with the journalists.
Artists and illustrators are just as critical and intellec­tual as writers are. That’s why I really hated being ghet­to­ized with the other art directors. I didn’t want to just talk about layouts, I wanted to sit with my editors and overhear the conversations, the arguments and talk about the issues at hand. The work of art directors is seen as in service to the words, and part of my whole career is say­ing no to that. Ideas are transmitted more quickly and more visually than ever before. What’s imparted visu­ally should be as intelligent, deep, and strong as what’s imparted verbally. And that also means that our art directors, our illustrators and artists really should be given the sort of gravitas they deserve and be taken seriously as thinkers.

»It was a playful experiment to tell their love story through an auction catalog«

In Germany, you’re mostly known for books like Swimming Studies, Important Artifacts, or Durch Manhattan, which combine text and pictures in a unique way. You say that you paint like you swim. Do you also write the way you swim?
That’s such a good question. And yes, I think so. I’ll write a chapter and then I’ll rewrite and rewrite it. It’s like doing lengths or painting the same thing over and over again. It’s almost like doing 400 meters in a pool. Your first 200 meters feel good, at the 300-meter mark you start to feel tired, and then your last 100 meters are just painful. That totally describes how I might write a chapter. How I tried to learn to write? In New York, there were little newsboxes on the streetcorners and there was one for the Gotham Writers Workshop.
It was 150 Dollars, and I had a good teacher.

Aquarelle seems to be your favorite choice when you’re illustrating. You also used it in the Manhattan book you did with Niklas Maak.
Oh yes. And we’ve got another book coming out. We ­recreated five famous car rides from films like Crash, Annie Hall and The Shining. While Niklas drove, I did hundreds of watercolors.

When you’re in a car and the landscape is passing by, it feels like being in a movie. But painting in the car sounds messy.
It was a little bit messy, but so much fun. I love land­scapes and the ones you see along highways are so transient and overlooked.

In the Manhattan book, Niklas Maak and you walk through the city together. One critic said about your black and white illustrations that they reminded him of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, where the inhabitants never see reality itself but always its interpretation through the shadows of things projected on the wall. Did you have that in mind?
Oh, I love that. And yes, I did. We walked through Man­hattan in three days. So, we were constantly on the ­move, and I wanted to convey that situation when you’re look­ing down and see your shadow and you’re looking up and see like a house, a sign or something. I wanted to abstract what I saw to get a different kind of portrait of New York.

Niklas Maak is a German feuilletonist. How do you actually know each other?
That brings us back to Important Artifacts because ­Niklas did an interview with me for the first edition. And he asked the smartest questions. Instead of the couple’s breakup, which is told through this auction cat­a­log, he was interested in what it said about consumer culture and climate change. But he’s not only very smart, but also very helpful. He introduced me to the ideas of Aby Warburg and his unprecedented language of images.

Whether you work with images or words, you’re always reflecting on storytelling itself.
For me, it’s important to pay attention to how people read, because language is alive and changes. And I think form always has to change to adapt as well. But that doesn’t mean making it as cheap and fast as it is today but turning it into something beautiful to be cheap
and fast to read.

Is this how the idea of Important Artifacts came up?
I went to an auction of Truman Capote’s belongings and realized that they were the best biography I had read. I saw his world, his alcoholism, his friendships. So I thought about using daily forms of reading, like a menu or an Instagram caption, to tell the story of Lenore and Harold. I wasn’t sure it would work. It was a playful experiment to tell their love story through an auction cat­a­log. Love is something that is born and dies, and I wanted to see if it could be transmitted in this way.

Photography is essential in Important Artifacts, and you’re defining it not as an art form, but as a language. Are we reading pictures now?
We’re so used to reading photography that we don’t need captions anymore. If someone takes a picture of their cappuccino, it’s understood what kind of neighbor­hood that is and what this person can afford. There are so many inflections to any given normal, boring photograph. But our trust in photographs is changing completely. I think that photography will not mean an “image” anymore but might become a way of saying that something is an untrustworthy or mitigated image.

You said anyway that you can only see the truth if you translate it to a painting or an illustration.
Abstraction can make things much clearer. It’s like a pinhole occluder you have to look through at an eye ­exam. It has a million holes, so if we make our vision smaller or we squint, we can see clearer. I’m interested in that as a metaphor.

Aside from all these projects, you’re the art editor of The New York Review of Books and you’re assigning illustrators.
I love that the Review favors the abstraction of an illustrated writer’s portrait over photography. They understand the power of a drawn portrait of a real person and also that it gives the writers a little bit more dignity and honor. I’ve been commissioning a lot of German illustrators; I really love their work.

»Abstraction can make things much clearer«

What makes an illustrator interesting to you?
There has to be something that betrays perfection. John Singer Sargent said: “A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.” I also like a cruder hand-drawn line and a very graphic, not too slick style. And I like when illustrators themselves write and read. Like Henning Wagenbreth. I gave him Celine to portray, whom he read as a teenager. And Baudelaire too. I have some idea of his reading now and keep that in mind.

And you are also working on a new book right now.
Yes, it’s a little bit of a memoir like Swimming Studies. I’m half Filipino, and it’s about growing up in Canada being bicultural and biracial. It also about my ancestors who were insurgents and generals in the revolution, and it’s about colonization, marriage, divorce, and my moth­er’s family. It will be like a mulligatawny, this Indian-English stew, with all these different things in it