From the Publisher

By Elizabeth P. Valk

With changing times, TIME's covers have changed dramatically. This week offers an excellent example: illustrating the vanishing ozone shield required the efforts of two photographers, a digital imaging expert and an art director who blended their work into a compelling design. But if many of our covers these days have become more conceptual to address broad issues, there was a time when we usually featured individuals, and assigned noted artists to paint them.

The results were often superb -- or at least the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington thinks so. At an exhibition running through May 17, the nation's official depository of portraits is showing 36 TIME covers of men and women who played key roles in the Second World War. "TIME Covers the War: Personalities from World War II" spans the period from Jan. 3, 1938, when General and Madame Chiang Kai-shek of China were on the cover, to May 21, 1945, when Japan's Emperor Hirohito was rendered as the divine "Son of Heaven." Also included: Joseph Stalin as the 1942 Man of the Year, General Douglas MacArthur upon his triumphant return to the Philippines in October 1944 and Adolf Hitler following his suicide in May 1945.

The works represent just a fraction of the 1,600 TIME covers -- the only magazine covers so honored -- in the gallery's collection, most of which was assembled in 1978 from our archives in the Time & Life Building. Frederick Voss, a gallery historian and curator of the TIME collection, says the covers "still evoke the images and immediacy of that time. They are picture editorials of World War II that weren't captured anywhere else." They also stand out because of their unique style, which relied on the use of often mythical background symbols to establish the cover subject's significance. The technique became the signature of the three studio artists commissioned by TIME: Boris Artzybasheff, Ernest Hamlin Baker and Boris Chaliapin, known collectively as "ABC." Of the three, Chaliapin was the most prolific, producing more than 400 cover portraits. ABC, says TIME art director Rudolph Hoglund, "were pioneers of a tradition" of recruiting distinguished illustrators for the magazine's cover art. Among them: Marc Chagall, Andrew Wyeth and Andy Warhol. We like to have our journalism keep that kind of company.