An Introduction: Piening, Albers, Giusti, Clyne

Hypergallery guest blogger: Scott Lindberg
About me: As a graphic designer, I began collecting record cover art as part of an "inspiration library." When this obsession grew out of control, I opened New Documents, a shop dealing in mid-twentieth century Modernist graphic design. I judge a book ... and a record ... by its cover.

I was so excited when Emily asked me if I'd write as a guest blogger for Hypergallery — it's fantastic to be able to interact with so many like-minded album art enthusiasts! By ways of introduction, I thought it might be interesting to bring you along on a recent trip I took to Minnesota. My wife, daughter and I make this 1,200 mile round trip-drive from our home in rural Illinois at least once a year to see family, and I always do double duty and turn it into a buying trip. This year I came home with about 75 new covers, and I'd like to share just a few of them with you.

In the 1950s, M. Peter Piening created this fantastic but little-known series of Cubist inspired album covers for The American Recording Society. Piening studied under Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and that Bauhaus connection is very evident in this body of work. Wonderful stuff!

Speaking of the Bauhaus, this trip also gave up two pieces from Josef Albers' famous series of 7 designs for Command Records from the late 50s and early 60s. This is about as good as American Bauhaus design gets, and Albers' cover for Leonid Hambro and Jascha Zayde is the hardest of the series to find. These pieces were produced under the art direction of Charles Murphy, who happened to be a student of Albers before going to work for Command Records.

Murphy also employed Italian designer George Giusti during his tenure at Command, although these two pieces from the 1960s were designed after Murphy had been replaced by Daniel Pezza. While these pieces are fairly atypical of Giusti's work for Command, they very much recall some of the covers he designed for Holiday magazine at around the same time. Plus those little pops of color peeking out from behind the collaged metal work is really a stunning combination.

A bit more subdued are these two Columbia Records covers by Ronald Clyne from the 1950s. While most people remember Clyne for his photographic 2-color designs for Folkways Records, these pieces use a graphic motif of dingbats and printers devices to create an intimate and rhythmic visual. I also think it's important to note here that Clyne produced these pieces under the art direction of Alex Steinweiss ... the man who invented the graphic album cover, and to whom I owe an awful lot of thanks and admiration.

Thanks! I look forward to sharing more of my favorites with you in the near future. In the meantime, I'm always chatting about album art and Midcentury Modern graphic design on Twitter.