Graphic Jazz

The exhibition presents about 180 record sleeves that show the evolution and different trends in the design of jazz record sleeves, the creative vigour and conceptual richness of the graphic design and photography applied to a music at the peak of its development. In addition to offering a selection of the leading designers in this field, there are works by outstanding artists who approached jazz on an occasional basis, such as the geometrical painter Josef Albers, the Pop artist Andy Warhol, the social realist Ben Shahn, and the photographers Lee Friedlander and W. Eugene Smith. The accompanying catalogue reproduces all the works exhibited and contains texts by Alfredo Papo, a pioneer in the popularisation of jazz in Spain, Angelynn Grant, Bob Blumenthal and Jorge García. The most natural and frequent meeting-place for the visual arts of the twentieth century and music is the record sleeve. Previously, however, historians of design and exhibition curators have scarcely touched on this area, or have done so in a very partial manner, concentrating mainly on “interventions” by Conceptual artists on the disc as an object in the sixties and seventies. This is probably because until recently record sleeve designers did not receive the same attention as other outstanding designers in the fields of books, magazines and posters, despite the intrinsic interest of their work and the notable influence of the music industry on the shaping of contemporary culture. Until the late thirties, 78 rpm records were sold in paper sleeves with a circular hole in the middle, or else appeared in albums identified only by lettering or a merely illustrative generic image. In 1940 Columbia Records decided to put cover pictures on its albums and entrusted the design to Alex Steinweiss, who was the company’s first art director. Steinweiss—who had trained in an avant-garde with European origins and for over three years had worked as assistant to Joseph Binder, an Austrian poster designer who had emigrated to the United States—radically transformed the record industry. His impact-making record sleeves, conceived like posters, brought Columbia a spectacular increase in sales, and in no time all the other record companies followed his example. With the arrival in 1948 of the ten-inch long-playing record, based on the microgroove technique, it was necessary to conceive a new container, and record sleeves became established definitively in the record industry. Steinweiss mainly designed classical music record sleeves, but his few designs for jazz are masterpieces. Columbia generally assigned jazz to a graphic designer who was very different but no less attractive, Jim Flora, who practised a crazy, humorous drawing style influenced by pre-Columbian art. These are the first record sleeves in the exhibition, in chronological terms. But in the mid-forties jazz experienced a revolution that gave rise to a style known as bebop. A much more intellectualised form of jazz than its predecessors, bebop was viewed with suspicion by the great recording companies—Columbia, RCA/Victor and Decca—and enthusiasts of the new music were obliged to create small, independent record companies in order to accommodate it. Alfred Lion, a German exiled in the United States after the rise of the Nazis, created the Blue Note label; Norman Granz, a great lover of modern art, established labels such as Clef and Norgran; Ahmet Ertegun, son of the Turkish ambassador to the United States, created the Atlantic label; and Riverside was founded by Orrin Keepnews, a critic with a university background. All these record producers saw jazz as an art, when it had previously been considered as just one more ingredient in the entertainment business, and purely commercial aspects were not a priority in their work. While the picture departments of the big record companies became increasingly cautious, the designers who worked for these new labels were almost always able to express themselves quite freely. The best of them, such as Burt Goldblatt, David Stone Martin, Paul Bacon, Marvin Israel and Reid Miles, created original, attractive graphic work (using photographs, lettering, drawing and layout), strongly influenced by avant-garde art movements and attentive to developments in the most advanced forms of graphic design. For many years jazz record sleeves were more interesting than those of other musical genres, which were aimed at an audience that was less demanding or had more traditional tastes. Between the mid-forties and the late fifties jazz was the prime exponent of adult popular music. Afterwards, however, it gradually gave way to other genres. In the late sixties it suffered a serious crisis that led to drastic changes: the small labels disappeared or were absorbed by the more powerful companies, and record sleeves assimilated the psychedelic trend that had become the rage in pop music, losing their individual character. The exhibition reflects this evolution, beginning with the pioneering designs of Steinweiss and Flora in the forties and closes in 1968 with a design by John Berg, an artist who worked mainly as a designer of pop music record sleeves.