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Alex Steinweiss: creator of the album cover

Contrasts in Hi-Fi by Bob Sharples.

A Tribute to Alex Steinweiss
The Creator of the Album Cover

Robert Berman Gallery announces an exhibition of Alex Steinwiss. Original album covers, paintings, and collages by Steinweiss, and special tribute by selected artists. Co-curated by Kevin Reagan and Greg Escalante.

In 1939, a 23 year-old graphic designer revolutionized the music industry. No longer would records come in plain brown wrappers. As Art Director at Columbia Records, Steinweiss created the ‘album package.’ His idea was to create a visual to complement the musical. It was an instant success, and spawned an entire new field of illustration and design: Album Cover Art. Steinweiss was the king of the genre; his covers are still regarded as icons.In his four decade career, Steinweiss created album covers for musical luminaries such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Igor Stravinsky and Benny Goodman.

The Miraculous Mandarin (circa 1977).

The Steinweiss exhibition will feature 50 of his original cover designs, plus 50 original ‘tribute’ works, created specifically for this show. Artists that are honoring Steinweiss in the show include: Clive Barker, Bill Barminski, Ron English, Mick Haggerty, Raymond Pettibon, Shag, and Glenn Wexler. The featured artists have created album covers for a wide range of musicians, including Black Flag, Dixie Chicks, Goo Goo Dolls, Supertramp, and Rob Zombie.

“Steinweiss is 90 years old this year; this tribute is long over-due. The art community is excited to have a chance to pay homage to Alex’s unprecedented contribution to album cover art,” says Kevin Reagan, three time GRAMMY winning Art Director.

“It’s amazing to discover this one man, this un-sung hero, who is responsible for inventing the album. Steinweiss should be a household name,” says Greg Escalante, curator of Juxtapoz, and co-founder of Copro-Nason Gallery.

“The opportunity to highlight ‘the art of music’ is exciting. You have the energy of two different genres, and their combination is explosive,” says gallery owner Robert Berman. “Just plain design didn’t mean a damn thing,” Steinweiss says. You had to know music. I had to find a way to bring out the beauty of the music and the story.” (dwell, 10/07)

Alex Steinweiss lives in Sarasota, Florida, where he continues to design and paint.

A Tribute to Alex Steinweiss
Gala Opening: January 19th
Show runs through February 12th, 2008

Robert Berman Gallery
Bergamot Station Arts Center
2525 Michigan Avenue, C2
Santa Monica, CA 90404

• Alex Steinweiss at the Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame
• For the Record: The Life and Work of Alex Steinweiss at Amazon
• Alex Steinweiss at Soundfountain

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Mervyn Peake in Lilliput

This month I’ve been redesigning the Savoy Books edition of The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson, in preparation for a reprint. This has involved scanning the covers of the issues of Lilliput, the magazine where Richardson’s tales of the dwarf surrealist sportsman first appeared, and one number of these, from May 1950, also includes a feature about nursery rhymes illustrated by Mervyn Peake. The paintings were reprinted in Mervyn Peake: The Man and his Art in 2006 but shrunk onto a single page so this is a chance to see them at a larger size. Also reproduced below is the accompanying article by Leslie Daiken and the Arcimboldo-style cover by Ronald Ferris. Some of the earlier covers by Walter Trier—all of which featured a man, a woman and a dog in a variety of guises—can be seen at VTS.

Update: For more about Mervyn Peake, see also Peake Studies.

“How many miles to Babylon?”
“Three score miles and ten.”
“Can I get there by candle-light?”
“Yes, and back again.
If your heels are nimble and light
You may get there by candle-light.”

Continue reading “Mervyn Peake in Lilliput”

Beardsley’s Salomé

So the first book purchase of the year turns out to be the original Dover edition of Beardsley and Wilde’s Salomé. This appeared in 1967, a year after the major V&A exhibition which introduced Beardsley’s work to a new generation and commenced the Beardsley craze that lasted into the Seventies. Not that I’m in desperate need of these drawings, having most of them several times already in different Beardsley books, but this volume is worth having since the reproductions are large size, very sharp and they took enough care to ensure that the uncensored versions of the drawings were used. The book also includes the complete text of Wilde’s play and Robert Ross’s Note on Salomé from 1930 which I don’t have elsewhere.

Beardsley’s work was subject to many censorship actions during his career but the Salomé book caused the most trouble (his later erotic works were private editions so don’t really count). The original title page shown here had the semi-erect penis of the winged boy and the pendulous genitals of the herma removed while one drawing, The Toilette of Salomé, was deemed too much and had to be redrawn entirely. That picture did contain a masturbating page boy so it’s perhaps not so surprising. There was such a lot to offend Victorian sensibilities in Beardsley’s work at this time, whether overt or surreptitious, that it’s remarkable the book was printed at all. His art was so radically different from anything else being done in 1894 that many people had difficulty accepting these pictures as illustrations at all, regardless of the content. As a result they missed salacious details that would have finished the career of a lesser artist. Wilde’s play was equally scandalous and could only be performed in France, having been banished from the London stage. As Robert Ross says in his Note:

Wilde used to say that Salomé was a mirror in which everyone could see himself. The artist, art; the dull, dullness; the vulgar, vulgarity.

The sense of shock extended back to Beardley’s original Salomé drawing (also included in the Dover volume) which appeared in the first number of The Studio in 1893, some of the readers of that magazine finding the detail of the spilled blood nourishing a phallic lily a grotesque detail too far. The Studio drawing was reworked and simplified as The Climax for Salomé. You can see the complete set of illustrations here. Neither that collection nor the Dover book include a picture of the original cover, however, whose splendid gold-on-green peacock feathers look a lot more impressive than Beardley’s rough design. So here it is.

• Download the 1906 US edition of Salomé free at the Internet Archive

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive
• The Salomé archive

The art of Laurie Hassold

left: Bent Fork (The Beginning of Hunger) (2007).
right: Strange Attractor IV: Zygomorph (2006).

“My core interest in making art lies in blurring the boundaries between art, science, literature and psychology,” says Laurie Hassold, and seeing that this is the week the monstrosities of Cloverfield are unleased upon America, it’s perhaps appropriate that some organic weirdness is on display at Bert Green Fine Art in Los Angeles. Laurie Hassold’s show runs until March 1st, 2008.

Via Phantasmaphile.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Jean Louis Ricaud

Bruges-la-Morte

Portrait of Georges Rodenbach by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer (1895).

Georges Rodenbach’s short, atmospheric novel is one of the key texts of Symbolism, not only for its themes but also for the art it either inspired or complemented. Bruges-la-Morte was first published in 1892 and the recent Dedalus Books edition, edited by Alan Hollinghurst and with a new translation by Mike Mitchell and Will Stone, was reprinted late last year.

Bruges-la-Morte…concerns the fate of Hugues Viane, a widower who has turned to the melancholy, decaying city of Bruges as the ideal location in which to mourn his wife and as a suitable haven for the narcissistic perambulations of his inexorably disturbed spirit. Bruges, the ‘dead city’, becomes the image of his dead wife and thus allows him to endure, to manage the unbearable loss by systematically following its mournful labyrinth of streets and canals in a cyclical promenade of reflection and allusion. The story itself centres around Hugue’s obsession with a young dancer whom he believes is the double of his beloved wife. The consequent drama leads Hugues onto a plank walk of psychological torment and humiliation, culminating in a deranged murder. This is a poet’s novel and is therefore metaphorically dense and visionary in style. It is the ultimate evocation of Rodenbach’s lifelong love affair with the enduring mystery and haunting mortuary atmosphere of Bruges.

Continue reading “Bruges-la-Morte”