“Artist Boris Artzybasheff had the incredible gift for drawing personality into complex machines. From telephones to bulldozers; space satellites to computers, he brought life to the machinery of the 1950s and 60s.” – D.W. Pine, Creative Director of TIME.
For the April 2, 1965 cover on “The Computer in Society,” the Russian-born artist painted an energetic life-like machine with an oversized brain, eagerly being fed punch cards and data from the workers beneath it. It was one of the first TIME covers to introduce a machine that “is beginning to affect the very fabric of society.”
As TIME wrote in the 5,000-word cover story: “swept forward by a great wave of technology, of which the computer is the ultimate expression, human society is surely headed for some deep-reaching changes.”
Arztybasheff was part of the golden age of TIME illustrated covers in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, called the
“ABCs” – Artzybasheff, Ernest Hamlin Baker and Boris Chaliapin. The trio produced 900 TIME covers and created a style that gave the publication character, strength and personality. Artzybasheff painted more than 200 covers from 1941 until his death in 1965.
