Photos of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused of fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, have been percolating around cyberspace for weeks, the subject of newsroom ethical debates and exponentially deranged memes.
But prominent cartoonist Jane Rosenberg had about 15 minutes to capture Mangione’s likeness during his first appearance in a Manhattan courtroom on Thursday, December 19, hours after he was issued a citation. federal arrest warrant. Her final image shows a recognizably bushy and broad-shouldered Mangione, flanked by his two lawyers, Karen Friedman Agnifilo and Marc Agnifilo; the accused shooter has a calm expression, somewhere between resignation and acceptance.
“I had to sit there and wait, which is very unusual, he still hadn’t come out,” Rosenberg said in a phone conversation with Hyperallergic. “I went to the courtroom, I’m finally all set, I have a good vision and it’s very stressful because it was so short, like always at an arraignment.”
The artist immediately noticed Mangione’s dress: a crisp white collared shirt, a black quarter-zip sweater, and khaki pants.
“They brought him in and I was so disappointed that they took him out of his orange jumpsuit,” Rosenberg said. “I had polished my orange crayons and I was really looking forward to it.”
“He was quite calm and didn’t jump out of his skin like he did when he was arrested,” she continued. ‘He doesn’t look like the killer he is. I mean, his face just doesn’t show it. He looks like a normal person.”
There is a strange fascination surrounding the practice of courtroom sketching, an enduring analog convention in an age of unbridled digital image circulation. In the case of high-profile figures, from whom Rosenberg has drawn countless – from Donald Trump to Steve Bannon and Daniel Pennyrecently acquitted in the chokehold murder of Jordan Neely – cartoonists face the added pressure of portraying a person whose image is ubiquitous, not only online and in print, but also in the collective imagination.
But when it comes to what’s shared on the Internet, Rosenberg prefers to drown out the noise.
“That happened during [the trial] by Tom Brady – I learned what a meme was,” Rosenberg said, referring to her drawing of the New England Patriots quarterback at the center of the 2015 “Deflategate” scandal that catapulted her to online virality. The artist’s courtroom portrait of Brady, which some considered unflattering, seemed to have a moment overshadowed the controversy over football from which the lawsuit arose. (“I have to apologize to Tom Brady and all his fans for not making him look good enough,” Rosenberg said at the time.)
“And then I learned that I don’t go on social media because there are a million people behind screens who think they’re art critics, and I’m just not going to deal with that,” she said.
In many other cases, Rosenberg has won praise for her ability to seize the moment and capture the ineffable essence of an individual, such as during the trial of Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, who sketched the artist while staring directly at her and straightened her out. back.
It is said that artists are their own worst critics, and for her drawing of Mangione, Rosenberg complained that she did not have more time to capture the composition.
“I wanted to get his je ne sais quoi”, she thought. “He was tilting his head a little bit from one side to the other, and I wanted to try to go for that a little bit more. But I had to turn it off as quickly as possible.”
She concluded: “I want to give it another shot.”
