MORE than any other publication in the world, TIME makes consistent use of and gives international exposure to the art of portraiture. Our cover is almost always a painting of an individual by a contemporary artist, who not only limns a likeness but also makes a statement through his treatment of both the subject and the background. Last week a new exhibition of original paintings for the cover of TIME opened a North American tour at the Atlanta Art Association.

When TIME readers see such a collection of cover paintings, they often express surprise at the wide variety of styles, sizes and mediums. The new show contains 60 works (the number will vary from city to city, depending on the space available in galleries and museums), done in oil, charcoal, tempera, oil on gesso, ink and wash, and pen and ink. The wide variety is not surprising when it is noted that the paintings are the work of 19 different artists. They include some of the world's leading portraitists: Pietro Annigoni, Boris Artzybasheff, Ernest Hamlin Baker, Aaron Bohrod, Rene Bouche, Bernard Buffet, Boris Chaliapin, James Chapin, William Dobell, Guy Rowe ("Giro"), Russell Hoban, Joe Jones, John Koch, Henry Koerner, Bernard Safran, Ben Shahn, Rufino Tamayo, Robert Vickrey and Henriette Wyeth Kurd.

After Atlanta, where the exhibition will be on view until Oct. 28th, it will move on to the J.B. Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Akron Art Institute, George Sherman Union at Boston University, Tennessee Fine Arts Center in Nashville, Vancouver Art Gallery, Royal Ontario Museum at the University of Toronto, Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Willistead Art Gallery of Windsor (Ontario), Seattle Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Salt Lake Art Center, M. H. De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego, Phoenix Art Museum, and Milwaukee Art Center.

We get a great satisfaction, of course, in giving TIME readers an opportunity to see the original cover paintings. Beyond this, however, we hope that this effort will add to the public interest in and appreciation of the old and honored art of portraiture. Through the years, as artistic fashions changed and technology advanced, the human face has been blurred by the visions of the impressionists, broken up and reassembled by the cubists, lost entirely in abstraction--and caught in the glaring lens of the camera. We believe that the portraitist, looking beneath the surface and illuminating character, will continue to have an important place in journalism--and in history.

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