If you are a college graduate, have a son or daughter in (or headed for) college, or a special interest in higher education, I hope that you will read Crisis in the Colleges in this issue. This story calls attention to the severe monetary troubles that are threatening to change the nature of U.S. privately endowed colleges.

The subject of next week's cover story in TIME is Picasso and modern art. It is eleven years since Pablo Picasso has been on TIME'S cover, and he might well have reposed there 30 years before that, if we had been publishing then. Picasso and a handful of other old men living in France have dominated 20th Century art from its beginning.

TIME'S Art writer, Alexander Eliot, spent a long working holiday in Europe last year talking with artists and looking at their work. He found a number of young painters and sculptors that TIME readers should know about, and reported on them in subsequent TIME stories, but he came home convinced that the old men of French art still far outstrip their followers.

"In France," Eliot said, "artists seem to age magnificently, perhaps because when they are young they worry less than U.S. artists about getting ahead. At 40, a French painter is still classified as 'young' and if he's not yet 'arrived' at 50 it's not too serious; he may still be admired in a cafe if not in a museum and his hopes for the future are treated with respect. France's best painters--Picasso, Matisse, Rouault, Chagall, Braque, Utrillo, Derain, Dufy, Vlaminck and Leger--are all in their 60s and 70s. These young-old men are still the Alps of the modern art world."

Next week's issue not only discusses the art of these ten moderns, but also carries a four-page, four-color insert of their work. Except for the familiar Picassos, almost all of these paintings have never been reproduced in color in a magazine, and some have had no previous color reproduction at all. The job of selecting them got under way last February; most of them had to be photographed in Paris.

The reproduction of these paintings in TIME involved the use of a new machine that TIME readers in the printing trade, in advertising, etc. may have heard about. The machine is an electronic color scanner, one of a whole group of experimental developments now under way. The scanner is designed to produce faster and more accurate color separation negatives. It may foreshadow a new era in the quality of color printing. It was originally conceived by Eastman Kodak engineers and cooperatively developed by TIME Inc.'s research laboratories, which are exploring a wide range of new printing developments in cooperation with other research units in the industry and major suppliers.

The scanner is in its experimental stage, but it has already produced some interesting results -- especially in bringing out the depths in dark colors. You can judge its work for yourself by examining closely the large center spread of paintings in next week's color insert.

Cordially yours,

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.