A Letter From The Publisher, Aug. 18, 1947

While Boris Artzybasheff was painting his cover of David Lilienthal for TIME’S Aug. 4 issue, he telephoned Assistant Managing Editor Dana Tasker and asked: “What color do you think atomic energy is?”

The result of the ensuing conversation, as illustrated by the Lilienthal cover, may or may not be what atomic energy looks like (they agreed it was purple and yellow), but it serves to illuminate the kind of thought and detail that go into the making of our covers. After eight years they have evolved into a new kind of journalistic portraiture that has become TIME’S trademark. To try to answer the scores of inquiries we regularly receive from you about them, I want to take this and the following letter to discuss our covers and the men who are mainly responsible for them.

Our editors date these portrait covers from the one of the late, great Ignace Jan Paderewski on TIME’S Feb. 27, 1939, issue. That assignment was given to Artist Ernest Hamlin Baker by Editor Tasker in an attempt to get a more significant kind of cover for TIME. Hitherto we had used a few conventional paintings, some color photographs and an occasional black & white or two-color sketch, but the old reliable black & white photograph was our standby.

The Paderewski cover rang the gong and succeeding ones convinced the editors that this was the kind of cover that more nearly typified TIME’S kind of journalism. In the beginning, Artist Baker set down his view of what he was trying to do. It is worth repeating here as the credo for a TIME cover:

“A good cover should not only help sell the magazine but also reflect its character. Therefore, in the same sense that TIME tries to bring out the true significance of world events in terms of personalities through its use of complete news coverage, it should be my job to bring out the subject’s true character through a complete coverage of his facial forms—forms that tell of minor Munichs, Dunkirks, heedings of integrity, yieldings to expediency, forms that have been stamped into his face by numberless deeds and intentions, good, bad and indifferent.

“These untold tales will emerge automatically and add up to the subject’s total character, provided only that I do two things: first, report unflinchingly every perceptible form; second, weave and integrate these forms into a living unity. If it works, I will then be telling TIME readers not only what the man looks like but what he Is like—a really good reporting job.”

For more than a year, Baker sweated out the bulk of these new covers. Then, Artzybasheff and Boris Chaliapin came along to contribute their respective talents. Tasker was, and is, liaison man, interpreting his and the editors’ ideas to the artists and vice versa. With Baker’s third cover (April 24, 1939) a symbolic swastika was inserted in the background of the Heinrich Himmler portrait. From that time on interpretive symbolism has been an increasingly significant part of the cover—to help identify portraits not immediately familiar to everybody, and to highlight the cover subjects’ current news value.

In this new kind of journalistic portraiture many conventional precepts went out the window.

For one thing, the week’s cover subject being determined generally by that week’s news, there was hardly time to ask him to sit for his portrait (in the case of our World War II enemies, for instance, it was obviously impossible).

Therefore, our artists had (and have) to work almost exclusively from photo graphs of their subject, supplemented by detailed research into his attributes and works. In so doing the artists found, of course, that no single photograph is a so-called spit & image of a man. Rather, what he really looks like is a sort of photomontage of many different pictures. There, the creative act of portraiture moved, according to many who have studied and thought about TIME’S cover portraits, into a dimension beyond the scope of the still photograph.

To be continued next week.