IT can be said of few artists that they are beyond imitation or that their work can be instantly identified. Yet this was true of Boris Artzybasheff, our old friend and colleague who died last week at the age of 66 (see MILESTONES). Looking at a computer eating file cards, a long-legged robot stalking through a lunar landscape, or a hydraulic press squatting like an ancient, malevolent god, one immediately recognized the unique vision of the 20th century that belonged to Artzybasheff.

"Artzy" created 219 TIME covers over the past 24 years. Though he will perhaps be best remembered for his anthropomorphic machines, he was a first-rate portraitist, with a sharp, spare style and, above all, a knowing wit. His last cover portrait--of North Viet Nam's Ho Chi Minh--appeared on last week's issue, and was on newsstands around the world when he died. His first TIME covers were done in June of 1941, and were soon followed by a memorable series of wartime portraits, including the classic view of Germany's Admiral Karl Doenitz riding through the waves alongside his pack of submarines, their periscopes shaped like evil sea serpents.

In his book of drawings As I See (1954), Artzybasheff brilliantly animated various neuroses and suggested wryly that the man of the future would be born with a built-in storage cabinet for platitudes, the woman of tomorrow without a nose ("deleted because it usually shines and often gets in the way"). Always he returned to TIME covers, keeping a measured pace with the era, from sardine-boxed commuters to the heartbreaking Berlin Wall, from mechanical cows to Architect-Dreamer Buckminster Fuller--whose head, under the special Artzybasheff treatment, became a geodesic dome.

A widower for the last decade, Artzybasheff was a gentle, courteous, urbane man, sedate in manner but impassioned in his work. If he sometimes painted nightmares--wars, monstrous weapons, a personified hangover that still haunts many a morning-after--it was only because he was on the side of man. Like most satirists, Boris secretly loved what he seemed to attack. A glimpse of a locomotive walking on crutches or a truck holding its head suggested that, to him, even machines had souls. What was more, they served man. "I would rather watch a thousand-ton dredge dig a canal," he said, "than see it done by a thousand spent slaves lashed into submission. I like machines."

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