Cover of the Day: December 1954

Leo Lionni, Art Director
Jerome Snyder, Illustrator

Cover of the Day: December 1932

Eleanor Treacy, Art Director
Ernest Hamlin Baker, Illustrator

Cover of the Day: December 1931

Eleanor Treacy, Art Director
Ernest Hamlin Baker, Illustrator

Cover of the Day: December 1946

Will Burtin, Art Director
Alvin Lustig, Illustrator

Cover of the Day: December 1944

Peter Piening, Art Director
Loren MacIver, Illustrator

Cover of the Day: January 1968

Walter Allner, Art Director
Romare Bearden, Illustrator

Original credit: For this special issue, Fortune commissioned Negro artist Romare Bearden, fifty-three, to convey his own mood of urban life. What Bearden pieced together is the striking collage on the cover. Bearden knows the neighborhood signposts well; he grew up in Harlem. He serves as art director of the Harlem Cultural Council, which seeks to encourage promising Negroes in the arts. For Bearden, the assignment was reminiscent of an earlier one. In 1942, he painted a picture to accompany a Fortune article on an all too familiar subject: the Negro and discrimination.

Cover of the Day: December 1936

Eleanor Treacy, Art Director
Erik Nitsche, Illustrator

Cover of the Day: December 1939

Francis Brennan, Art Director
Arthur Gerlach, Photographer

Cover of the Day: December 1941

Francis Brennan, Art Director

Fernand Léger, Illustrator

"The migration coming to the U.S. today is perhaps the most extraordinary of the many that have served to people this continent. For this is not just people fleeing famine or oppression. This is a transplantation of a whole culture from one continent to another. Since the rise of Hitler, a large body of Europe's intellectual leadership has been moving to the U.S.  . . . But there is no ready pot in which to melt and fuse the dynamic forces of art and of ideas. The great questions are whether, during American trusteeship, Europe's transplanted culture will flourish here with a vigor of its own, or languish for lack of acceptance, or hybridize with American culture, or simply perish from the earth". --"The Great Flight of Culture" December 1941

Cover of the Day: December 1947

MADISON AVE N.Y.C.

Will Burtin, Art Director

Matthew Liebowitz, Illustrator

Cover of the Day: December 1945

DEPARTMENT STORE

Peter Piening, Art Director

Alexander Steinweiss, Illustrator

"A store's prestige does not live by merchandise alone. The personal touch of its service departments is as profitable to the store as it is costly to maintain. A few years ago Field's was asked by the executors of an estate to refund the price of a pair of real silk stockings purchased by the deceased twenty years before but never worn The refund was paid promptly. This unquestioning acceptance of the idea that even the dead customer is always right pleased management as much as it would have gratified the founder". --From Marshall Field, the Store, December 1945

GRAPHICS SPECTACULAR!!!

Former  FORTUNE Graphics  Editor LINDA ECKSTEIN blogs about Fortune's early years of amazing graphics, see the entire post here http://bit.ly/en7TrP

Cover of the Day: December 1956

Leo Lionni,  Art Director 

Alexander Semenoick, Illustrator

Robert Weaver, Illustrator (the frieze)

Original caption: Bright patches on this month's cover are the holdings of oil companies in the tidelands off the Mississippi Delta. The  cover, executed by Alexander Semenoick, is based on a detail of a map prepared by Macha Drafting Col, of Houston. The cover frieze, showing steel construction, was painted by Robert Weaver. 

Cover of the Day: December 1952

Leo Lionni,  Art Director 

Walter Allner, Illustrator

Holiday Cover of the Day: Dec 1937

Eleanor Treacy, Art Director

Joseph Binder, Illustrator

Cover of the Day: December 1967

Walter Allner, Art Director 

Leo Stashin, Photographer

Original credits: The cover photograph was shot by Leo Stashin at the printing plant of Moore Business Forms in Niagara Falls, New York. Moore has been printing social security cards for the U.S. Government since 1936, when it ran off 40 million numbered cards and application forms--probably the largest single printing order ever filled by a business-form manufacturer. Moore, still the sole printer of social security cards, turned out some ten million this year. 

Cover of the Day: December 1951

Leo Lionni, Art Director 

George Giusti, Illustrator

Original credits: George Giusti, Italian-born artist and designer, used compass and pencil as well as brush to give the metallic finish to his tempera painting of a steel drill biting through steel boiler plate. This is the sixth cover Giusti has painted for FORTUNE.