http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/books/review/Visuals-t.html
By STEVEN HELLER
Published: May 28, 2009
Someday a company like Pixar will create a virtual Beatles reunion
concert, depicting them in real time as they are (or would be) now,
singing their greatest hits as they might perform them today. I
suppose there are copyright and other obstacles involved, but I
guarantee it would be a blockbuster among my rapidly aging
generation. Yet failing this digital reunion, memories of the Fab
Four and the British Invasion can now be stirred by Alan Aldridge's
book THE MAN WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES (Abrams, $35). Aldridge was the
illustrator whose airbrushed images captured the ethereal essence and
comic brilliance of the Beatles' lyrics in a two-volume work titled
"The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics" (1969 and 1971), which he edited and
which included the graphics of other significant illustrators along
with his own. Although Aldridge's art is not psychedelic in the San
Francisco style, it is certainly drug-inspired in a
fab-gear-mod-London way the pictorial analogue to "Lucy in the Sky
With Diamonds." I still have my pristine copies and recall the first
time I paged through them; they were an essential document of the era
and an inspiration for many aspiring hippies, like me.
Aldridge, a former art director and designer for Penguin Books, had
originally created a series of illustrations to accompany an
interview with Paul McCartney for the magazine The Observer. These
and other images were then used for something called "The Beatles
Sinister Songbook." That evolved into the first "Beatles Illustrated
Lyrics"book, which featured some 70 illustrators riffing on songs in
a variety of media and mannerisms. In "The Man With Kaleidoscope
Eyes," Aldridge recalls meeting McCartney for the first time. He
writes in an animated, dialogue-heavy style, replete with clichés:
"It was the Summer of Love 1967. The sounds of 'Sgt. Pepper,' the
sweet reek of 'grass' and joss sticks was everywhere. Groovy chicks
in thin summery dresses and no bras invited 'free love.' It was good
to be alive." While I second that emotion, the problem with this book
is that, at times, inadvertent self-parody takes over. It's filled
with great pop history and exquisite art, but the writing can be a
little arch.
Nonetheless, since Aldridge played a major role in British pop
culture, his stories are fascinating. Take the time in 1970 when he
met with Prime Minister Harold Wilson at 10 Downing Street to discuss
a poster campaign he had designed. You'll have to read the book to
learn what happened.
Aldridge's work was '60s-defining: In addition to being the court
artist for the Beatles, he was known for his 1968 poster for Andy
Warhol's film "Chelsea Girls," in which he transformed a woman's
naked body into a veritable Chelsea Hotel, with sculptured characters
hanging out of windows on her stomach and chest, and a doorway where
her private parts should have been. He also produced psycho-surreal
images for the Rolling Stones, the Who and Elton John (the cover of
the 1975 album "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy").
During the '60s, Aldridge's style was rather cartoony in a
balloonlike way, owing to his emphasis on the airbrush. By 1973, for
an illustrated children's book, "The Butterfly Ball and the
Grasshopper's Feast" (written by the poet William Plomer), he had
developed a meticulously detailed, fanciful approach that might be
called neo-Victorian. Inspired by an 1807 poem by William Roscoe,
Aldridge created scores of anthropomorphic insect characters. The
book "became a huge hit, selling 100,000 copies by Christmas 1973."
The most instructive part of "Kaleidoscope Eyes" is the reproduction
of his sketches for these characters, which reveal his expert
draftsmanship. He continued doing elaborately composed illustrations
for books like "The Peacock Party" (1979), "The Lion's Cavalcade"
(1980) and "The Gnole" (1991).
Aldridge also tried to do an "Illustrated Lyrics" book for Elvis.
Instead, having taken himself to Hollywood in 1981, he started to do
concept designs for Colonel Tom Parker, Presley's manager: the
"Throne of the Rock 'n' Roll King" a "multimedia dais" intended for
the lobby of the International Hotel in Las Vegas and an inflatable
statue of Elvis. "Like all things that sound too good to be true," he
writes, "my deal with the Colonel quickly fell apart. Designing stuff
for Elvis didn't have the allure and glamour of movies."
"Kaleidoscope Eyes" is jammed with art of all styles, but glued
together by its whimsical content. Aldridge's imagination is without
bounds, although some of his styles, notably his pen-and-ink work,
lack the elegance of his children's books. He's also done his share
of crazy gothic logos and sci-fi toy designs. I can't say I love his
later work, but if all he had done was define the '60s, that would be
groovy enough.
Where does the word "gig" come from? For a few decades, at least,
posters announcing rock concerts have been called gig posters, and
there is even a Web site devoted to exhibiting and analyzing them
called GigPosters.com. There is no single style for gig posters
they are punk, grunge, new wave, neo-modern, comic, retro, parodic
and satirical. Some are beautiful, others ugly; some derivative,
others novel. Most are eye-catching, and some are memorable. Those
that are wheat-pasted on hoardings or taped to lampposts are usually
removed within days, so GigPosters has been a terrific archive of the
good, the bad and the ugly. But digital versions just don't compare
with the printed posters, which is why GIG POSTERS: Rock Show Art of
the 21st Century (Quirk, paper, $40), compiled by Clay Hayes, founder
of GigPosters, is such a useful resource.
The book contains posters by leaders of the art form (including Emek,
Eleanor Grosch, Lil Tuffy and Luke Drozd), who offer brief
commentaries about their work. It's hard to pick out favorites, since
each poster has its own appeal. Johnny Crap's poster for the Pixies
uses a '60s-era typeface designed by Milton Glaser, yet the design,
with a large illustration of a ladybug, is surprisingly timeless.
Invisible Creature's poster for Brand New is a startling minimalist
image of a comically rendered, spiked monolith crashing to the
ground; what it means, I have no idea, but it caught my eye. And I
can't stop looking at Dan Stiles's image for a Mars Volta concert
the impression of a black skull out of whose eyes and mouth come
colorful psychedelic swirls which reminded me a little of Alan
Aldridge's early work.
This is just the first volume. Since Hayes boasts more than 100,000
posters in his collection, this prospective series can go on
indefinitely. For now, however, it's good to see that despite the
elimination of LP and even some CD packaging, rock music still
excites more than the ears.
Soon, physical album covers will be as extinct as eight-track tapes.
Passionate collectors are hoarding classic record sleeves, some of
the most memorable of which were created by a British design firm
called Hipgnosis. Founded by Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson in
1968, the firm was known for eerie and erotic staged photography that
wed magic realism to Surrealism. Hipgnosis employed comedy, mystery
and sexuality (sometimes all at once) in its elaborately composed
tableaus. Among the bands branded by its images were Led Zeppelin,
Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Genesis and Wishbone Ash. Covers for these
groups and many more are reproduced in Powell and Thorgerson's FOR
THE LOVE OF VINYL: The Album Art of Hipgnosis (PictureBox, $45),
which comes with additional commentary on specific albums by various
artists and designers, including Peter Blake and Paula Scher.
Hipgnosis helped define '70s rock with covers for Pink Floyd's "Atom
Heart Mother," showing a cow in a field; Paul McCartney's "Band on
the Run," with his group caught in a spotlight trying to escape,
prison-break style; and Led Zeppelin's "Presence," which depicts a
perfect, "probably Middle American" family sitting around a
yacht-club dinner table hypnotically smiling at a mysterious black
object. Like "Kaleidoscope Eyes," "For the Love of Vinyl" offers
detailed case studies of album designs made when rock music was the
zenith of popular culture and the bands were larger than life.
So this artwork is emblematic of its time. But as the design critic
Adrian Shaughnessy writes in an essay here, "Looking back at the best
Hipgnosis covers . . . their most salient feature, besides the
imaginative potency of their 'ideas,' was that their most successful
covers have not dated like so many sleeves done at the same time."
And some of them are still quite menacing like a Scorpions album
cover with a man in a limo, in a three-piece suit, pulling a
humongous wad of bubble gum off the bare breast of an otherwise
elegantly clad woman. About this cover, Thorgerson notes: "I always
felt marginally uncomfortable with the piece because of its possible
sexism, but the Scorpions loved it. . . . Though they didn't love the
next one nor any others in later years. Ah well, you win some and
lose many." Hipgnosis disbanded shortly before album covers were
miniaturized to CD size. I trust, given their penchant for enormous
graphics, that Powell and Thorgerson made the right decision.
Rummaging through the old record bins at secondhand stores can be
like stumbling on unknown masterpieces in a museum, only dustier. For
me, one of those surprises was the cover of the 1956 LP "Mel Tormé
With the Marty Paich Dek-Tette," designed by Burt Goldblatt. It shows
the outline of Tormé's head (though it also looks like a young
Sinatra), made from a collage of automobile silhouettes. This album
cover and 650 others from the 1940s through the early 1990s are
collected in Joaquim Paulo's JAZZ COVERS (Taschen, paper, $39.99),
edited by Julius Wiedemann. It's a bricklike compilation of
groundbreaking design and photography, and it's almost as much fun as
rummaging through those old bins, only cleaner.
Jazz labels sought out the most progressive graphic design during the
'50s and early '60s. In addition to commissioning some striking
studio and conceptual photography, art directors encouraged
illustrators and painters to interpret the improvisational music
abstractly. Joan Miró's Surrealist "Composition" adorned the cover of
a 1956 album by the Japanese-American pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi, and
William Claxton's Dadaesque trompe l'oeil collage for a Chet Baker
record from that same year "capitalizes on Baker's matinee pinup
status." David Stone Martin's 1954 portrait of Count Basie, which
looks similar to Ben Shahn's ragged line style, is nonetheless a
remarkable evocation of Basie's music.
The sheer quantity of albums in this book ensures that not every
cover will reach the same aesthetic heights. But the cool modernist
minimalism displayed on many of Reid Miles's Blue Note covers is a
high point, as is the Expressionist cowboy who turns up on a Modern
Jazz Quartet album designed by Stanislaw Zagorski. One of the biggest
treats was finding another Mel Tormé cover, this one a forgotten
piece by Piedra Blanca (the pseudonym used by Alex Steinweiss, the
first designer to create original artwork for 78-r.p.m. albums). But
my favorite, for the wonderfully atmospheric photograph and visual
pun, is the image on "The Hawk in Paris," a record by Coleman Hawkins
and Manny Albam, which portrays a typical Frenchwoman of the evening
sitting at a cabaret table nonchalantly holding a hawk by its talons.
Now that's cool.
The covers for a subgenre of jazz albums known as bachelor-pad music
usually had a photo of a sexy woman with a come-hither look. What
differentiated this exploitative form from another kind of art, the
romance novel cover, was nuance. The album covers were moody, while
the book covers were swoony. What's more, romance-novel illustration
almost always featured a white, blemish-free, idealized woman,
whereas jazz albums were often more eclectic. In THE ART OF ROMANCE:
Mills & Boon and Harlequin Cover Designs (Prestel, paper, $25),
Joanna Bowring and Margaret O'Brien trace a century of lovelorn
fiction through its covers. Predictably, the formula of a beautiful
woman looking longingly at a handsome man has not changed all that
much (except now there's more photography).
Mills & Boon, Britain's leading publisher of romantic fiction, is 101
years old; Harlequin, which owns the company, is 60. Throughout these
years loyal romance readers have been treated to some enduring
fantasies for example, the sheik as hero. Today, the authors say,
"the modern Mills & Boon sheik is a rich, international businessman,
but still rooted in the traditions of his desert background."
Although sheiks have changed, the covers continue to tell the story
of undying male and female stereotypes. "The hero is dark, striking
and rugged, possibly of a higher social status than the heroine and
appears indifferent or ruthless, often at the mercy of a passion he
is unable to acknowledge." Oh, my! The heroines "vary from the
sedate girl next door to the working woman and the glamorous beauty."
When these stereotypes meet, the result is an image of eternal love.
Or so it is written.
Finally, here's a book about romance of a different kind: the love of
nay, the desire for chicken. Actually, it's the author's passion
for the storefronts and signs of chicken restaurants and takeout
joints in London. The hundreds of photographs in CHICKEN: Low Art,
High Calorie (Mark Batty, paper, $24.95), by Siaron Hughes, a graphic
designer, are lovingly assembled, but they may turn you off to this
versatile bird forever. What makes the book so marvelously
unappetizing is the way Hughes organizes it: from pictures of gaudy
shop fronts, with their loud, brightly colored signs, to shots of the
wall menus, which are not that different from auto-repair price
lists, to photographs of the photographs of food, which are so badly
composed and lighted as to make every sauce-drenched or deep-fried
item look as if it came from a medical textbook. But Hughes loves
this stuff. "What started as a curious quest instigated by my
profession has grown into something more, something personal," she
writes. "I have met the people who customize and adapt these unique
and eye-catching visuals to suit their neighborhoods. They are not so
concerned with theories and practice so much as providing a service."
Peppered throughout the book are interviews with sign makers and
chicken experts.
The fun comes with the logos (most with happy chicken faces) in the
"Graphic Language" section, which includes a visual analysis of the
typography and ornament used to draw attention, and of the routinely
garish color schemes for graphics and shop interiors. "At first
sight, much of this signage appears the same," Hughes writes, "but
there are differences, subtle as they may be." The author notes that
chicken signs in New York are a little more restrained than those in
London, and her mission was to find out why. For me, the surprise
hidden in this book is found in an interview with Richie, a sign
maker, about why the food looks the way it does in pictures: "It's
all photography tricks. For example, when we do the chicken burger,
you don't ever fry the chicken burger like how you would sell it. You
like half-cook it, then we get a box of buns and you choose the right
one, the best one. . . . The bun is set back and tilted away so you
have a sense of it being much bigger!" The secret is out.
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