Barry Blitt was born in 1958 in Côte Saint-Luc, Quebec. He graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1982, spent a decade drawing celebrity half-pages at Entertainment Weekly, and has contributed to The New Yorker since 1992. More than a hundred covers. Cartoons in the magazine and online. The line is watercolor, a little wet, almost polite.
The joke is the situation. George Washington at a dead party. The Statue of Liberty counting days on a cell wall. The Obamas in the Oval Office as a Fox News fever dream (The Politics of Fear, 2008). Deluged, his 2006 cover, was voted Cover of the Year by the American Society of Magazine Editors.
He won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, cited for watercolor style and gentle caricatures of the personalities and policies that came from the Trump White House. He is in the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame. The pictures have also run in Vanity Fair, Time, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and as weekly drawings for Frank Rich at The New York Times. He works from the Connecticut woods.
Steve visited Blitt in the woods for the series: a working table of ink, crumpled covers, and the quiet that makes the joke land.
