Vogue covers have been talking to us for 128 years. They talk to us about who we are and about the world we live in. This year, with our world turned upside down, by the plagues of COVID-19 and presidential incompetence, we invited two contemporary artists, Kerry James Marshall and Jordan Casteel, to make paintings for our September covers.

Artists have created Vogue covers before, on rare occasions: Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Marie Laurencin, and most recently, John Currin, who painted Jennifer Lawrence for the September 2017 issue. (Marcel Duchamp was asked to do one in 1943, but Vogue then turned the resulting piece down.) What’s different this time is that Marshall and Casteel were given complete freedom to decide who would be on their cover, a real or imaginary person, and how that person would be portrayed. The only requirement was that they choose a dress by one of four Vogue-selected designers for their subject to wear.

Salvador Dalí’s 1939 cover for Vogue © Artists Rights Society, 2020, © Salvador Dalí Museum

Giorgio de Chirico’s 1935 cover for Vogue © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

John Currin’s 2017 cover for Vogue, Untitled, 2017. ©John Currin. Vogue, 2017

Marshall, 64, whose 2016–17 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art confirmed his status as one of the greatest living artists, was knee-deep in other commitments when I called. The image was due at the end of June—two weeks away—and he said he couldn’t do it, but he changed his mind when I was able to stretch the deadline. He created a fictional character, as he always does in his paintings, and dressed her in a white formal evening dress by Off-White. The dress is spectacular, but what your eye goes to is the face. “I’m trying to build into her expression that she’s not dependent on the gaze of the spectator,” he told me during one of our frequent telephone calls. “‘I’m here and you can see me, but I’m not here for you.’ That’s a critical element. The great word, ultimately, is going to be ‘self-possessed.’ That’s what I’m aiming for.”

Kerry James Marshall Photo: Kevin J. Miyazaki/Redux

The Black figures Marshall paints have skin so dark that it is, as he says, “at the edge of visibility.” Like Ad Reinhart’s black paintings, I asked. He responded that the comparison was apt: “Reinhart said he was turning the light out on painting. But if you’re going to be at the edge of visibility, you’ve gotta put all the information in there. The reality is that even when the lights are off, everything that was in the world is still there. You have to put it in there so that if people actually look hard, they can see it. The point is to show that blackness is rich and complex, within the blackness alone.”

To get this, Marshall begins with three different shades—carbon black; iron oxide black, also called mars black; and ivory black, also called bone black—and then adds cobalt blue, chrome green, carbazole dioxazine violet, yellow ochre, and raw sienna. “The color comes up when you stack them on top of each other,” he says. Marshall texted me the final image mid-July, and at first I could barely see the features of her face. But as we talked, they emerged, gradually and indelibly. “If you’re going to be painting a face as black as I’m painting them, they can’t just be a cipher, like a black hole. They have to be mysterious but available,” he says. “If you say, ‘Black is beautiful,’ you have to show it. And what I’m doing is showing it at the extreme. Yes, it is black—very black—and it is very beautiful.”

A sketch of Kerry James Marshall’s work for the September issue, Working Study 1, 2020. Courtesy of Kerry James Marshall. Photo: courtesy of Kerry James Marshall

Another sketch from Marshall: Working Study 2, 2020. Courtesy of Kerry James Marshall. Photo: courtesy Kerry James Marshall

Another sketch from Marshall: Working Study 3, 2020. Courtesy of Kerry James Marshall. Photo: courtesy Kerry James Marshall

The figure stands regally in a room that opens onto a penthouse terrace. You can see high-rise buildings and the sky. “The fact that she is some place instead of no place is important,” Marshall says. “She’s not part of the decor. She has her own presence, her own psychology. The reality is that it’s a Black woman in an outfit that’s a pretty rarified runway kind of garment. If you take a dress that has fantastic elements like that one does, you have to ask, ‘Can that dress really be worn?’ So I tried to make a figure who could wear the dress. It’s important for me to show simply that the figure thinks. You don’t know what she thinks, but you can tell she has something on her mind.”

Jordan Casteel Photo: Tyler Mitchell. Vogue, 2018

Jordan Casteel, 31, has caught the art world’s attention with her intimate, arresting portraits of family and friends and people she’s observed in her Harlem community. Forty of these works were on view at the New Museum (her first New York City museum show), when the coronavirus intervened—the show has been extended to the end of the year if and when the museum reopens.

For her Vogue cover, Casteel chose a real person as her subject, fashion designer Aurora James, who made headlines in June with her 15 Percent Pledge, a campaign to support Black-owned businesses. “I believe that what Aurora is doing is hugely important in creating the long-term change that Black people deserve and this country owes us,” Casteel tells me. (She emailed daily images that showed how the painting was progressing.) “I see her as a light in a lot of darkness, and a potential for hope, a representative of change across all creative industries. What’s most exciting to me is being given artistic integrity and being able to choose the person to be my sitter—someone who reflects a portion of my own identity—and then to do that truly in the medium of my choice. This is the way that I speak to the world. And this is the way I’ve been speaking to the world and talking about the humanity of our people, talking about humanity in general. It’s a really profound experience. I do think I’m participating and a change is happening.”

An early stage of Casteel’s cover painting, Aurora. Photo: Courtesy Jordan Casteel

Aurora sits on a high stool on her Brooklyn rooftop, wearing a Pyer Moss creation—yards and yards of blue silk that echo the sky behind her. It’s a baroque image, worthy of the Renaissance’s Pontormo. “I think of the sky as being full of endless possibilities,” Casteel says. “A lot of hope lies within that. The two birds next to her are a moment where I think of flight—the opportunity to move into new spaces. Most of the windows have the same blue that is in the sky. I like the idea that the hope of the sky came inside this urban building-scape, that whoever occupies that space within is also seeing the sky. I think about her foot being pressed against the ground. I purposely chose this active foot that feels like it’s propelling her upwards into the world above her—she’s stepping into the space of real possibility. Those are some of the things I thought about in making this portrait as it relates to hope and all the things that can exist beyond where we are right now. To create a better future, not only for ourselves but for those we love and those who will come after us.” Blue sky also appears in Marshall’s painting. For him, it represents “what’s beyond—boundlessness.” There’s hope in that as well.

BY DODIE KAZANJIAN, August 25, 2020

The Making of Vogue’s September 2020 Covers