MEMO FROM THE EDITOR
MEMO from the Editor For Art's Sake Regular readers of this magazine, and especially of its Letters pages, know that the graphic illustrations accompanying many of the articles are, and for years...
...Other colleagues commented that though they had no personal objections, they feared that many readers would take offense, thus needlessly jeopardizing the success of their attempts to build The Progressive's circulation and influence...
...They call them original, perceptive, powerful, even inspirational...
...Where does that leave me with respect to the controversial art work in our October issue...
...That brief hiatus (or armistice) ends with this issue, as a glance at the page opposite will confirm, because of an extraordinarily strong reaction to last month's cover art and to an inside graphic accompanying the article headed "The Death Squads Hit Home...
...Images from the pages of this magazine appear in prestigious collections and have won notable awards...
...I have little sympathy with the view, expressed by an occasional correspondent, that the world is quite ugly enough as it is without depicting its ugliness in the pages of The Progressive...
...Some questions have no simple answers...
...Among those who objected were the authors of the article and several members of The Progressive's staff...
...They write indignant letters to the Editor denouncing the drawings as ugly, depressing, distracting, or just plain dumb...
...Describing the world as it is, in words and pictures, is no small part of our monthly task...
...And a few tell us that the art work is the principal reason they subscribe...
...Some—here's a profoundly un-American thought—have no answers at all...
...On occasion—on relatively rare occasion, fortunately—they threaten to take drastic action, such as canceling their subscriptions, unless something is done about the look of the magazine...
...A written account of an atrocity, no matter how brutally detailed, will be accepted by many people who would recoil in horror from a graphic presentation of the same action or event...
...Since Patrick JB Flynn redesigned this magazine six years ago and assumed its art direction, The Progressive has been on the cutting edge of political art in the United States...
...Several months ago, we stopped publishing letters about the graphics—not because the letters stopped coming (they didn't) but because some readers told us they were tired of the subject and, frankly, so were we...
...ours is, after all, a magazine for mature and sophisticated readers...
...We hope readers will share that pride even when they are less than enthusiastic about a particular piece of work...
...Often we see those images reprinted (without our foreknowledge or the artists') in foreign publications...
...it is every bit as appropriate to deploy graphic images in that effort as to rely on the printed word...
...But we take pride in the process and in the fact that at The Progressive, artists as well as writers find a level of freedom that is rarely encountered in American journalism...
...Like some of my colleagues, I did not find the images intrinsically offensive...
...Like others, I am compelled to sympathize with those readers who were offended, and to wonder whether we enhanced or undermined the message we attempted to deliver...
...Any experimental process is bound to encompass a few near misses and an occasional outright failure...
...All of these views, and others expressed in the correspondence we have received, deserve a respectful hearing...
...Other readers are no less passionate in their defense of the graphics...
...What seems clear to me, after hours of deliberation and discussion, is that for many readers, art has a power to stimulate or repel that far exceeds the power of the printed word...
...MEMO from the Editor For Art's Sake Regular readers of this magazine, and especially of its Letters pages, know that the graphic illustrations accompanying many of the articles are, and for years have been, a subject of fierce controversy and contention...
...One of my colleagues here said he found the graphic on Page 17 of the October issue "gratuitously vulgar...
...But I could not leave the subject of last month's illustrations without saying a few words about The Progressive's total graphic presentation...
...Our mission is to provide the information and arouse the consciousness that will help build a better world...
...Some, but not all, of the women on the staff felt the art was demeaning...
...Undecided...
...Patrick Flynn is an artists' art director-one who encourages some of the best illustrators in the country to make the most of their creative impulses, to be daring and innovative, to portray the human condition as they perceive it.'The results are often unexpected and sometimes unsuccessful—from Flynn's perspective or from mine or from the perspective of some readers...
...Some subscribers—let's be blunt about it—despise the art work that appears in The Progressive...
Vol. 51 • November 1987 • No. 11
