TIME is primarily a word magazine. But from the beginning it has used pictures to make a point, to document, to illustrate, to provoke interest. Back in 1945 TIME also launched into color -- primarily on the art pages, where it seemed insufficient merely to describe a painting in words and inadequate to print it in black and white when its values so often depended on its colors. The result of this longstanding color program has been a week-by-week history of art, past and present, that is unmatched anywhere, in any magazine. The earliest crude beauty of Sumerian sculpture, the high glories of Renaissance painting, the colored infernos of present-day abstractionists have all been seen in TIME. This week, for example, while most U.S. newspapers are content to print the list of the top prizewinners at the Carnegie International of Pittsburgh, and a few to show the prizes in black and white, TIME brings not only the news about the judging (as told by Art Editor Bruce Barton Jr.), but reproductions of the winners in full color.

Long ago TIME passed beyond merely illustrating the world of art in color and launched into an elaborate and costly (roughly $850,000 a year) program of adding "extra dividends" in color throughout the magazine. They no longer are mere occasional dividends but a regular offering. This week's four-page tour in color of the prospering California vineyards (see MODERN LIVING) brings to 134 the number of pages in color that TIME has run this year. Under the direction of Assistant Managing Editor James Keogh, the color project is the responsibility of Senior Editor Cranston Jones and Art Director Michael J. Phillips.

In recent months photographers have followed missionaries in the Amazon jungles and in the Arctic for TIME, have flown over and photographed the engineering beauty of the American Road, and captured the delight of children witnessing in Manhattan's Central Park a new zoo devoted to children. Many magazines, of course (though no other newsmagazine), send their photographers to faraway places. But TIME's purpose is different from most: it seeks to add a new dimension to news coverage by the use of color. Thus TIME's eight pages of color in August on Southeast Asia showed the look -- the beauty, the languor, the hardships, the progress -- of a place that has become a cold war battleground. And the narrow alleys of the Casbah and the modern technological city of Colomb-Bechar (the Cape Canaveral of the Sahara), as shown in eight pages of color on Algeria last April, coincided with the news of the Generals' Revolt in Algiers.

Right now, the editors have other projects afoot for the weeks and months to come, adding the unique and vivid impact of color to the drama of the world's news.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.