"This is it--the face of the era," wrote the reviewer in the Israeli newspaper al Hamishmar. "All the greats are collected there--Jackie Kennedy next to Ho Chi Minh, Churchill rubbing shoulders with Maria Callas and Golda next to Nasser." The event described was an exhibition of 40 TIME cover paintings, and Golda herself was there to peer at her own portrait by Boris Chaliapin. The exhibition has been seen in seven countries. Last week it opened at the U.S. Cultural Center in Madrid. The critics on the whole have been approving, although some have taken an occasional dig at our artists. "Marvels of technique and characterization," wrote the Jerusalem Post of some of the paintings, adding cheerfully about certain others: "Kitsch does not always make a bad cover." The critic of Beirut's French-language paper L'Orient--Le Jour called TIME "a culture by itself" with "an influence as strong as a tidal wave." Declared the Guardian after the show opened in London: "Like pecan pie and The Star-Spangled Banner, TIME magazine cover portraits seem to be an institution, the last home of portrait painting."

The show covers 25 years--from Ernest Hamlin Baker's traditional tempera of a benign Winston Churchill, the "Man of the Half Century" (Jan. 2, 1950), to an atmospheric oil of a saturnine King Faisal, the Man of the Year (Jan. 6, 1975), by Bob Peak. Anwar Sadat's head is perched on sphinxlike paws in a pencil-and-ink sketch by Isadore Seltzer (May 17, 1971), while Peter Max produced a comic mixed-media collage for our "Is Prince Charles Necessary?" cover (June 27, 1969). The brooding poet Robert Lowell is given a crayoned zigzag crown of laurels by Sidney Nolan (June 2, 1967), while Boris Artzybasheff painted a blue-faced underwater Jacques Cousteau (March 28, 1960). Among the other artists in the show: Pietro Annigoni, Bernard Buffet, Rene Bouche and Peter Hurd.

Said James Keogh, a former executive editor of TIME and now the director of the United States Information Agency, which sponsored the exhibition: "We feel that the art that has been used on TIME covers is a testimony to the diversity, quality and vitality of American art and design."

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