Not long ago West Point asked us to get up an exhibit of TIME cover paintings of World War II military leaders to be displayed in their War Department Theater (TIME is required reading for all West Point upperclassmen each week).

A little later the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum said they wanted us to prepare a similar gallery of our cover paintings (United Nations statesmen) to be shown during the San Francisco Conference.

Since then our cover paintings have been on tour to other cities, and six more shows are already scheduled for the months ahead.

And so, on the chance that these paintings may be heading your way (see time-table below), I thought perhaps I should tell you something about the show and its reception up to now.

This exhibit includes portraits by Artists Ernest Hamlin Baker, Boris Artzybasheff, Boris Chaliapin and Guy Rowe--and already it has attracted record crowds at the Portland Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art. And when these covers were shown in San Francisco as part of a special United Nations Art Exhibit, the State Department and Mayor Roger Lapham invited the foreign delegates to visit the museum and the reception there attracted more than five thousand people.

The American Artist Magazine says TIME'S covers have "created a sensation ... set a style"--the Portland Oregonian hails the paintings as

"something new in art" -- the San Francisco Chronicle calls these TIME cover

portraits "t h e

most popular of

the new shows."

So I hope you

will want to visit

the exhibit for

yourself if you

live anywhere

along the route

these covers will

take.

Many of the portraits you will see were lent by the newsmakers they depict -- for the originals of TIME covers have gone (among many others) to General Hodges and Madame Soong, General Krueger and Senator Vandenberg, Mrs. Jimmy Doolittle and the mother of General Mark Clark. TIME'S painting of General Patton is framed at his Massachusetts home "Green Meadow" -- General Somervell's portrait is in his office at the Pentagon Building -- and our painting of General "Tooey" Spaatz hangs on the wall of his wife's home in Washington ("I have never seen a picture of him half as good," she wrote Artist Baker).

Some of the paintings we are sending on tour have not yet appeared on the cover of TIME (right now we have 49 covers showing probable future newsmakers all ready to put on the press). And some of these traveling portraits never will be printed. One of them is Baker's painting of the late Erwin Rommel; another is Chaliapin's portrait of Field Marshal Siegmund List. For these covers were painted months ago -- when the Nazi tide was at full flood and it seemed one or another of these enemy brasshats would have to make TIME'S cover some week.

Cordially,

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