A Letter From The Publisher, Nov. 28, 1960

WITH this week’s portrait of Columnist Sylvia Porter, Vienna-born Artist Henry Koerner, 45, chalks up cover portrait No. 15—a gallery of paintings that have caused some TIME readers to applaud us for printing great art, others to hoot in dismay. One woman was so appalled by the appearance of New York Times Washington Correspondent James Reston (Feb. 15) that she wrote in asking about the state of his health: “The boiled right eye with its drooping lid, the bulbous nose—everything he eats or drinks must disagree with him.”

Added another reader about Senator Stuart Symington (Nov. 9, 1959): “I must protest the green eyebrows, inflamed eyes, mud under his chin and applesauce in place of hair.”

The painter’s big job is to find what Koerner calls “an invention”—a pose, a gesture or expression that somehow reveals the essence of the person before him. “I invade privacy,” says Koerner, “the most highly secret, sacred privacy.” The green hair and the purple patches of flesh are in fact a legacy of the mpressionists —”the idea of green foliage, blue sky, warmth of flesh, all playing, interchanging with each other.” For the dominant color of the painting as a whole, Koerner searches for clues in the subject’s own character.

Sylvia Porter sat for him for 15 hours over a period of five days in her Manhattan apartment. For the background. Koerner climbed to the top of the New York Post building “so I could see Wall Street and make blobs. The wind was fantastic and I said to myself, ‘Why am I so insane?’ But I wanted the blackness of the canyon, with a background of evenly lit windows. You invent as you go.”

As to the subject’s reaction to a Koerner portrait, Sylvia Porter’s might be taken as typical. “I think it’s a great portrait,” says she. “I don’t think it’s flattering. But I think it’s a great portrait.”