A Letter From The Publisher: Apr. 28, 1967

IN the post-abstract expressionist era of the '60s, modern art has been racing ahead at a frantic clip that is a challenge to its chroniclers. In recent years the editors have taken the readers through the worlds of pop and op (a TIME coinage, by the way) and on to kinetic and minimal. This week it's luminal. In a wide-ranging story, the Art section surveys the work of a new group of practitioners who "paint" in light. As usual in TIME, the story is supported by a portfolio of color illustrations.

We have long made liberal use of color engravings—which happen to be expensive but which, we feel, are indispensable to art journalism. As early as 1934 we ran color to support a story about American artists, including Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. Since May 1951, Art has run color illustrations as a regular feature—1,413 color pages all told. "Black and white photography," says Senior Editor Cranston Jones, who is in charge of the Art section, "leaves out an essential element of the artist's statement."

We have photographed works of art around the world, in museums, churches and palaces. André Malraux has said that color reproductions have created a "museum with out walls"; we like to think that TIME can be something of a museum between covers.

We pay due attention, of course, to classic as well as modern art, but it is the new and bizarre forms that pose special problems for the critic and the photographer—as we found again in working on the story about the luminists. They are very serious about their seemingly playful work, and their background is apt to be broader—or at any rate more technical—than that of the traditional artist. Their experience includes such far-away fields as nuclear physics, optics and electronics. "They are of the technical age," says Piri Halasz, who wrote the story, "but they remain artists primarily." Researcher Leah Gordon found Nuclear Engineer Earl Reiback's projection technology so complicated that she brought along Science Researcher Sydnor Vanderschmidt to help her interview him.

One of the works shown no longer exists; it was a series of projections from a machine called Clavilux, which its inventor, Thomas Wilfred, has since dismantled. Fortunately, before doing so. he photographed the projections. Not an easy thing to do, as our lensmen learned when they tried to focus on the moving, blinking, flashing machines. Said Photographer Frank Lerner: "To give the idea of light in motion was a difficult assignment because there is no such thing as a norm." He repeatedly went back for retakes; his subjects never looked the same. "I came back so often that I began to feel like The Man Who Came to Dinner at the gallery."