New Forms of Life

The September issue of Life bears on its cover a caricature mask of Franklin Delano Roosevelt affixed to the sitting body of a boy doll. Between the doll's outspread feet is a pie, upon which rests what might be an apple or a tomato. Caption: "Let's See What a Good Boy Am I."

Most striking is the life-like perspective of the group. The pie looks really edible. The doll's hands look as if they could be grasped. Reason for this is that the design was not a painting but a color photograph of the objects, an innovation in magazine cover work.

Just when youthful Editor George Teeple Eggleston was toying with the idea of using colored photographs on Life's cover, into his office walked Abner Joseph Epstein (Dartmouth 1931), nephew of famed Sculptor Jacob Epstein. He had made some paper masks of U. S. politicians, wondered if Life could use them. With him Editor Eggleston concocted the "Little Jack Homer" subject for the first of a series.

Artist Epstein, who has taken the name Abner Dean, made the Roosevelt mask. A doll was bought from Macy's. Christmas pies being out of season, a strawberry pie was substituted and a plum from an unemployed fruit vendor. At the plant of Powers Engraving Co. the group was posed against a yellow cardboard background before a color camera. Four exposures were made, one for each cardinal color, one for the black, upon transparent plates. The four plates, exactly superimposed, gave the result. Because the printer wanted to brighten the purple plum by reducing the blue, it came out red. Next month's cover has been modelled by Tony Sarg, famed marionette maker. It is a figure of Life's symbolic cherub, shouldering a football nearly as big as himself.

In his efforts to escape hackneyed and stilted media. Editor Eggleston has introduced two other forms of illustration in Life: caricatures modelled in tin, marionette groups in clay.

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