Cover Song: A brief history of Alex Steinweiss, the Inventor of Album Art
Nothing focuses the mind on a design genre like its obsolescence—its recent obsolescence, that is, noticed by its practitioners and its users only when that form has been breached. So it is with the record album cover. With the superannuation of the album itself in the early 1990s, ceding to the CD, the art of the album cover was practically pushed off a cliff. The 12-inch square cardboard format that had proved one of the most dynamic and widespread forms of poster design in the world—the third world hardly less than the first—was shrunk to a quarter of its size and entombed in a plastic case. For those who have resented the shrinking of the album cover to the size of their palms, it’s small comfort to know that the CD itself is being pushed toward oblivion by download technology.
Record-album cover design began as a relatively radical marketing ploy and retained its pizzazz through its entire lifetime. This was due in no small part to the man who invented the genre, Alex Steinweiss. Almost as soon as he signed on as art director for Columbia Records in 1939, he was proven to be the right man at the right time. A young designer well attuned to the liveliest designs of the day, from WPA posters to Bauhaus book covers, Steinweiss was also a visual wit and, perhaps most importantly, a passionate music lover. He sought to bring the experience of the music itself to its package, as if illustrating the liner notes or even the sounds themselves; and he did so in a manner that perfectly balanced personal idiosyncrasies with contemporary stylizations. And for the entirety of his career, which lasted through the 1960s, Steinweiss kept up with the music and the currents in artistic fashion...
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