He invented the album cover
Do you remember your first own record? This feeling of stroking the colorful cover with your hands, watching the stars' pictures for hours, memorizing the list of songs. A record was much more than music. She was an experience.
Alex Steinweiss: Music to watch
Alex Steinweiss in his studio.
An elderly gentleman with white hair and thick glasses made a major contribution. Alex Steinweiss, born 1917 in Brooklyn, is the inventor of the modern record cover. In the 1930s - before his simple but ingenious idea - shellac records were sold in plain brown cardboard cases.
Steinweiss, at the age of 23, and now the art director of Columbia Records, loved music. But he found the cardboard envelopes "terribly unattractive". So he suggested to his superiors to make some covers. The potential buyers should look at their cases and hear the music immediately thanks to the pictures. The first record he helped create was a recording of Broadway legends Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Steinweiss took a photographer to New York's Imperial Theater and persuaded the owner to put the names of the two musicians on the illuminated sign. The image of this neon sign, in the background the grooves of a record in orange? The motif of the very first record cover was finished.
Alex Steinweiss has designed around 2500 record covers
His bosses were enthusiastic. Allegedly, the sales of some plates increased by more than 800 percent, after he had helped them to a new shell. Steinweiss, who had learned his trade as a poster designer, managed to transfer music into clear, appealing images. For Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" he set a small piano, illuminated by a street lamp, against the night-blue backdrop of a big city. On the cover of Sergei Rachmaninoff's "Songs of Rachmaninoff" tender female hands released a little bird to freedom. One of his designs for Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5, a white wing with a rainbow-colored beam, inspired the band "Pink Floyd" to cover their album "Dark Side of the Moon" more than 30 years later.
Steinweiss, who now lives in Florida with his wife and still works as an artist, has designed around 2,500 record covers over the course of his career. Taschen-Verlag has published an opulent illustrated book with its most beautiful covers.
