Françoise Mouly

Design Matters with Debbie Millman

Françoise Mouly traces her unconventional journey from a politically charged childhood in Paris to becoming the longtime art director of The New Yorker and

Key takeaways

• Françoise Mouly co-founded RAW magazine with Art Spiegelman in 1977, elevating comics to a recognized literary and visual art form.
• She arrived in New York in 1974 with only $200-$400, working odd jobs like selling cigarettes at Grand Central to learn English through visual observation.

Main topics

• Evolution of comics and graphic novels
• The New Yorker cover art history & curation

Notable quotes

"Print is dead, long live print."

Conclusion

Mouly's reflections underscore the enduring power of physical media an

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) The best images develop in time. And in time, I mean in split seconds, so that at first you see the topic, you see what it's an image of, and then you get it. Speaker 3 (0:19) From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. Speaker 3 (0:26) On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, a conversation with art editor Françoise Mouly about her life and about her new book of covers from the New Yorker magazine. Speaker 1 (0:43) My book is a collection of images, and it has a point. Print is dead, long live print. Speaker 2 (0:57) Welcome to the library. Speaker 2 (1:03) These shelves hold secrets and stories that will linger long after you've left this place. Speaker 2 (1:10) Perhaps you're in the mood for a haunting. Speaker 2 (1:14) Or something with sharp teeth. Speaker 2 (1:18) Perhaps a tale of ruinous hubris or a sinister pact. Speaker 2 (1:24) creature from the deep? Speaker 2 (1:27) Wild Stevenson Wells James Stoker Shelley I have them all in my collection and nothing but to The Haunted Library is open. Speaker 2 (1:48) The Haunted Library, wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 4 (1:55) Francoise Mouly has spent more than four decades expanding what images can do. In 1980, she co-founded the groundbreaking comics magazine Raw with Art Spiegelman, which established comics as a form capable of extraordinary literary and visual depth. Since 1993, she has been the art director of The New Yorker, where she has overseen nearly 1,600 covers. and helped shape one of the most recognizable visual identities in publishing. Her many honors include France's Order of Arts and Letters and the Legion of Honor, the Society of Illustrators Richard Gangl Art Director Award, the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award, and induction into the Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame. Her newest book, The New Yorker, From Cover to Cover, looks across a century of the magazine's extraordinary cover art and at the artists, ideas, and decisions that have made those images endure. Françoise Mouly, welcome to Design Matters. Thanks so much for having me, Debbie. Françoise, is it true that when you were growing up, you wanted to be Joan of Arc? Speaker 1 (3:11) Well, in Speaker 4 (3:12) a Speaker 1 (3:12) broad sense, I mean, I wanted to choose a British out of France, yes, like many of my compatriots. I don't remember saying this, but it does fit with, I grew up being like 13 in 1968 and lived through the takeover of Paris. By the students. And I was really lucky because everybody else evacuated Paris, including my mother and sisters. But my father was a surgeon and stayed behind. And I lived through the city under siege with General de Gaulle that actually arranged for tanks to... cut off all entry or exit of any kind of food. I mean, it's medieval, but that's what happened. And my dad was excited, and we would go to the cartier d'Etat. I remember restaurants that were there were cooking and serving everything they had because they cut off the electricity as well. So we were... just feasting and going from like one Assemblée Générale, it made revolution seem very attractive and generative and lively. That spontaneous generation, yes, was something I kept for a long time. At Speaker 4 (4:54) that time, you described the streets where you lived filled with slogans. poetry, drawings, and flyers. And I'm wondering, what did that public language begin to ignite in you at that age, at 12 or 13? Speaker 1 (5:10) Well, it was really a contrast with Paris that I had grown up in, because Paris I'd grown up in was stultified and empty. I had No color and no posters, no nothing, no life. Everybody had evacuated. I lived in the equivalent of the Upper East or West Side with my parents. But arriving in the Gartier Latin was where you saw speech on all the walls and graffiti and publications and public speech. And it was night and day. From what I knew, I didn't even know anything about Paris. So what a way to discover it. Your father, Speaker 4 (6:02) as you mentioned, was a plastic surgeon. He was a very visible plastic surgeon, very pioneering. And you were one of three daughters. And your father decided that you would be the child that followed him into medicine. And you said that when you were young, you first liked the idea. Before you began to question it, what did being chosen for that role mean Speaker 1 (6:25) to you? Part of it had to do with autonomy and also the fact that the question was never in front of us as to what will we do when we grow up, because it was still anchored in my mother's generation. What you do is that you get married and have children. That's all. So the idea that there was even a profession felt special. And I was receiving, in retrospect, a decent education in the French lycée. I liked the fact that I was in an old-girl lycée. It was segregated by gender. I worked, and I worked hard, but my heart was toward literary. I liked... French, I like drama, I like being in plays. And because I was supposed to be groomed for med school, I also had high-level math, physics, and biology. So I had quite a range of education, and that has served me well. And also, I wasn't exposed to any prejudice about girls are not good at math or girls are not good at this or at that. It's something that I encountered only when I came to America, that culturally my perception of gender discrimination, I don't ever remember growing up with that. As you got older, Speaker 4 (8:07) you had a boyfriend who was studying architecture, and that brought you to the École des Beaux-Arts. And much of your education there consisted of working for older students. You were cutting pieces for models, filling in architectural renderings, learning by physically making things. At that point, did you think you wanted to become an architect? Speaker 1 (8:29) Yes, that was the point of it. There were other schools I could have gone to, but this is now 1970. And the one that I went to still taught in the old-fashioned way, where we drew. And I'm very glad that I jumped on the one where, like, you were making models. But I discovered a dilemma, which is I was really happy in school. Like we had a lot of cafes and it was a whole group of people. But often we would find people who had graduated and would come back to school and would join us at parties. We're called Pince-Fest, pinch ass. Why would they call that? Because that's what you did or what was done to you. Speaker 1 (9:24) So the graduated cohort, almost all of which were male, would come back and basically they were all miserable as functioning architects. And it seemed that the only options were either you were going to work for a big studio. architecture, and then you would be one of the, whatever, 20 to 50 minions that would do a very small part of the job. Or, if you're really, really lucky and really good at that, maybe you could have your own studio and create your own vision, but All commissions would be rich people wanting some fancy house. And second, you basically became a salesperson for yourself and your ideas. And you would have to support a team of a minimum of eight people to 12 people. So you had to bring in commissions all the time, whether you felt like it or not. And for me, it was really... frustrating because we all could see it's an eight years course of study that after eight years the fun stopped and then you had a pretty dreadful life to pay for it. Sounds like a lot of the Speaker 4 (10:57) design business still. You've written that architecture left you frustrated by the distance between what could be imagined on paper. and what an architect might ever actually see built. What did you begin wanting from making things that architecture was not giving you? I Speaker 1 (11:20) also felt that architecture was a fantastic discipline to learn. Everybody should learn architecture, maybe not for eight years, and then they should drop out. Because in real life, even if you have a fantastic concept for a building, You meet reality in terms of the means to accomplish what you want, which are unattainable by a person. And then what it costs and also like what the community feedback will be and zoning and the rules. And it's almost impossible to keep track of what you're trying to do when you're... are ceaselessly confronting it to reality. And when I discovered graphic art, I just thought, like, oh my God, like you can have the same vast approach in your thinking, but a pen and a piece of paper is all it needs. You sketch it out, you're pretty much on your way. There are actually quite a few would-be architects who are cartoonists. Speaker 4 (12:41) You traveled to the United States and arrived in New York on September 2, 1974. You had very little money. I have some accounts that say you had only $40. I have others that say $200, but still not a lot. Very limited English and no intention of permanently abandoning architecture at that point. Your first accommodations included the YMCA and the Salvation Army. At that point, what were you hoping to do in New York? I Speaker 1 (13:09) had $200, and that was supposed to last a year in 1974. And I needed to step away and very far away from Paris. I never left New York. I couldn't. I just fell in love with the city and the range of possibilities. Speaker 1 (13:29) I felt constrained in Paris, and I did. In New York, you could do whatever you wanted. So I worked for an architectural firm, but they were Japanese, and they liked me and I liked them because I never chatted, and neither did they. And I just worked. And one day I worked. I talked to no one. There was no coffee cooler. And the French and the Japanese agreed on this. I could do a lot, but I couldn't do chit-chat. That was the most impossible thing for me, to speak, to say nothing. I just didn't know how to do it. And I was in a Richard Foreman play, but again, saying nothing. Weren't Speaker 4 (14:18) you Speaker 1 (14:18) also a cigarette girl? Through my roommate at the Salvation Army, she set me up with a fantastic job for me, which was selling cigarettes in a kiosk. The kiosk was outside of Grand Central. And again, I... Didn't have to say anything to anyone, but they said to me, like people lined up and then they would say, like, Winston and Parliament and Packard Camel. So I just watched people and then little by little, I learned sociological. markers of what the people could be. So I made it a game. I was facing the people coming and the cigarettes were behind me to have my hand on the packs that I predicted they were going to ask for. And some were easier than others, like they were cigarettes called more, which were long and very narrow, only smoked by women and mostly smoked by women who had long, made up nails. It was most difficult for me was to distinguish between Winston and Marlborough at the time. They were Speaker 4 (15:36) very close. Speaker 1 (15:36) Cowboys, yeah. And it was fantastic. I mean, I would get up at six o'clock in the morning and bicycle to Grand Central. By then, I had already graduated from the Salvation Army into a rental on 13th Street. And then I found a loft in Soho. So I had my own space. And you still have that loft now, right? Yes. That same loft. It's incredible. And from being homeless, I actually haven't moved in, whatever, 52 years. But after the cigarettes, I would go to the Japanese Architectural Agency. And then I would get downtown and I would go to Richard Foreman's play. And then I would go home and I would, you know, fix my loft to the distress of my neighbors because I was hammering like a new floor. Speaker 4 (16:40) In the fall of 1976, you met Art Spiegelman at a dinner party, but you weren't particularly impressed. He talked a mile a minute. I understood not a word of Speaker 1 (16:52) what he was saying. Everybody was laughing, but I didn't have any kind of special connection. Then the language problem was becoming something where I knew I needed to... All my jobs, I spoke to no one, so I wasn't progressing. And I sought out comics because of that context, that point of entry that it would give me into not just the language, but into the spoken language. And I just thought, like, okay, that's going to work well. And as a result of asking, I was given a copy. of a comic book that Art had done that had Prisoner on Hell Planet, which is a comic strip that he did about his mother's suicide. 24 pages. I was able to read that. I didn't know anything else about Art, but I was so shocked by the impact that it had on me and how... raw and intimate. I had somehow been given an aperçu of someone's most intimate and private thought. It was truly like the first thing I read that actually like reached me in a way. And I wanted to talk to him. And I couldn't speak with anyone and I certainly couldn't speak on the phone because the phone you're missing facial expressions and you're missing again like lips moving and so many contextual clues and I spent like eight hours on the phone with him I just you know I spoke a little slower and And I just found it so interesting. I kept asking questions. He kept answering. He never evaded any of my questions. I never met someone so... Speaker 1 (19:08) articulate and so available. And that's one of the things that I relished about being in New York was how it was okay not to know. I realized that being in New York in the first year or two or three when I first arrived, didn't teach me that much about Americans or about New Yorkers, but it taught me a lot about being French. Speaker 4 (19:35) And Speaker 1 (19:35) I realized that I was spending my life pretending to know things I didn't know and how forbidden it was to be naive and to not know. And all of a sudden, I had license to know nothing and ask, and people answered me.