Time magazine, one of the best-known periodicals in worldwide publishing, years ago developed a series of hand-drawn color portraits of World War II figures for its covers.
Fifty-five of those covers are now on display at Turn the Page Bookshop in the Williamsburg Premium Outlets. They’re part of the 225 covers in the extensive Time collection of Richard Broadwell of James City County.
“I always read Time and began collecting the World War II portrait covers in the 1980s and worked for about 10 years to get the covers I wanted,” he explained.
American Artist Magazine credited the technique of Time’s covers as having “created a sensation … and set a style” — at once recognizably realistic and three-dimensional.
Also involved in Broadwell’s methodology for collecting was seeking those covers by the ABC artists: Boris Artzybasheff, Ernest Hamlin Baker and Boris Chaliapin. Many of the covers were done as spot news assignments, while others were drawn three, six or nine months before “the march of events made their appearance on Time’s cover inevitable,” according to a 1944 story in Life magazine, Time’s sister publication.
When not out on assignment, the artists typically studied a range of available photos to develop the portrait they wanted, according to a Time history of its own covers.
Broadwell said he first discovered the unique portraits as he was going through outlet malls seeking used magazines, especially Life and Time, “looking for Winston Churchill material.”
He decided to exhibit the covers “because I had this collection and thought it would be of interest to others, who probably didn’t know they existed.” William & Mary’s Muscarelle Museum was contacted just before the COVID-19 pandemic about the possibility of an exhibit, but nothing materialized.
So when Ralph Tedeschi opened his Turn the Page Bookshop, Broadwell suggested showcasing the Time covers there.
“Our hope is to draw people into the store,” Broadwell said. “This is not for me. I loathe attention. But if it’s something that can help Ralph’s store, I’m all for it.”
After looking through the 225 World War II-related covers, “Ralph and I selected excellent representatives of the collection, with the primary focus being the color portraits by the ABC artists,” he said.
The individual magazines are not for sale — “only for look,” Broadwell said. But an offer for the entire collection might initiate a discussion, he added.
Of all the covers, Broadwell said he likes the one of Winston Churchill, Britain’s war-time prime minister, the best, partly because it was his interest in Churchill that prompted the beginning of his Time magazine collection.
When Churchill died in 1965, Broadwell was an undergraduate “and was reading the Chicago Tribune’s reports on the front page of Churchill’s death. At that point, I knew about World War II, but knew little about Churchill.”
His own research about England’s World War II leader prompted him to begin his own Churchill collection of books, newspapers and memorabilia. He ultimately found six Churchill Time magazine covers from the 1920s until his death.
Broadwell examined the Time magazine catalogue of covers from 1922 to 1986 “and got interested in Time’s Man of the Year (now Person of the Year) covers. I decided to get only the issues I was interested in. They are really cool.”
Wilford Kale, kalehouse@aol.com
