A Letter From The Publisher: Mar. 31, 1961

TIME readers, at least, should not have been caught by surprise at the headline news about the crisis in Laos. For months past, our reporters have been reporting the futility, the pathos, the menace of the developing news from Laos. Fortnight ago, TIME captioned its cover story on King Savang Vatthana “Laos: Test of U.S. Inten tions.” And in one of the first cover stories of 1961, TIME, describing the job of Pacific Commander Harry Donald Felt, concluded that “Laos, where events tumbled forward with sweep-second hand relentlessness, was per haps the least attractive theater in which Felt would want to apply his talents. But as the hour of necessity arises, he is prepared to keep the peace if possible, to win a war if necessary.” He still is.

FOR this week’s cover story on guilt and anxiety, a most 20th century subject, TIME found the most appropriate cover expression of the subject in a painting called The Cry, which dates from Berlin in 1893.

It was painted by Norwegian Artist Edvard Munch (pronounced Moohnk), who, although a founder of the expressionist school of painting, has only lately begun to gain some of the fame of his turn-of-the-century contemporaries, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec. Considered a madman much of his life, the anguished and neurotic Munch was the son of a military surgeon who became a religious fanatic later in life and of a mother who died of tuberculosis when the boy was five. “I always felt,” recalled Munch, “that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick and threatened with punishment in Hell.” His own life was a succession of scandalously successful art shows, denounced for their “fever-sick hallucinations,” of troubled love affairs, heavy drinking, instability, and finally nervous collapse. He spent the last 30 years of his life in semiseclusion in a large country house on the outskirts of Oslo, painting and refusing to sell his paintings. A few years before his nervous collapse, he painted Self-Portrait with Cigarette, which has been called “a vision of daemonic grandeur, Munch as he thought of himself as seen by the world.”