A Letter From The Publisher, Sep. 2, 1957

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TWO years ago, TIME'S Art Editor Alexander Eliot rolled a sheet of paper into his typewriter and carefully composed a memo to Senior Editor Edward Cerf. The memo developed an idea that Eliot had been trying out on his friends in the art world and his colleagues, including TIME Art Director Michael Phillips and myself. "We now have the opportunity," Eliot wrote, "of producing the first really handsome historical survey of American art ever published. The raw material for such a book is already ours." By raw material, Eliot meant an impressive collection of 1,069 color plates printed in the Art section since 1951, when TIME began regular use of full-color pages to illustrate the section.

"On the TIME-honored principle that human beings are interested primarily in other humans," he wrote,

"chief emphasis of the text would be on the artists themselves—their lives, philosophies and working methods. The next emphasis would be on their work, describing the qualities that made each picture alive and unique. Finally the time, place and spirit surrounding the artists and inspiring their art should be evoked." Eliot summed up the need for such a book in one three-word sentence: American art matters.

Editor Cerf was convinced. With encouraging approval of Editor-in-Chief Henry R. Luce, Managing Editor Roy Alexander and myself, he assigned a full-time writer

to the project. The writer was, of course, Alexander Eliot. The task of designing and producing the book went to Art Director Phillips.

This week, I am happy to announce, Alexander Eliot's exciting new book, THREE HUNDRED YEARS OF AMERICAN PAINTING (328 pp.; 250 full-color plates) is rolling off the Chicago presses

of R. R. Donnelley & Sons. By Nov. 1, it will be distributed by Random House to bookstores in the U.S. and later abroad.

Author Eliot, 38, is an art editor with deep roots and long training in his field. A child dauber, he was ten when he first became aware of others' paintings. Borrowing his father's bicycle one day to visit a cubist exhibition at Smith College, where his father is a professor, he promised to be back in two hours, so father could ride to his English class. When Professor Eliot stormed into the gallery five hours later, his son was staring at an early Picasso "with the gaze small boys usually reserve for double banana splits. A fatherly swat brought Alex to, but it also woke him. he recalls, to the sudden awareness that for him a painting might be more important than a bicycle.

At the Loomis School in Windsor, Conn., Eliot learned to draw and paint, trying style after style. At Black Mountain College he was influenced by Abstractionist Josef Albers; later, at the Boston Museum School, he turned more conservative. At 21, after

exhibiting in Boston and New York, Eliot opened a small gallery in Boston. But he was turning more and more to words as a medium of self-expression. After a stint with the MARCH OF TIME, and wartime duty in the Office of War Information, he joined TIME in 1945 as a contributing editor.