In the Spotlight

Exhibit Explores "The Rise and Demise of Album Art"

There are certain album covers as familiar to Baby Boomers as their own treasured family photos: The original skull-and-roses cover on the Grateful Dead's eponymous 1972 release; the psychedelic, fish-eye portrait of Jimi Hendrix on his 1967 album, Are You Experienced; or how about the striking image of Bach standing in front of a Moog synthesizer that graced the 1968 cover of Switched on Bach, one of the first classical albums ever to go platinum?

"Sound Design: The Rise and Demise of Album Art" is a new Northwestern University Library exhibit that celebrates the glory days of the album cover, explores its dual identity as an art form and a marketing strategy, and mourns the loss of a consumer experience that has been gradually extinguished by the advent of downloadable music.

During the decades when listeners browsed in music stores by flipping through bins full of albums, record companies committed considerable time and expense to developing highly creative and arresting covers for their albums. Alex Steinweiss, the first art director hired by Columbia Records in 1939, was later credited with "inventing the album cover." Several of the 2,500 covers he designed during a 30-year career illustrate how deeply he was influenced by the French and German poster artists of his day. A series of Deutsche Grammophon covers demonstrate the evolution of the company's distinctive crown-of-tulips logo, the brainchild of advertising consultant Hans Domizlaff (1892-1971), who is now recognized internationally as one of the fathers of modern marketing. Deutsche Grammophon produced both classical and popular music recordings, and Domizlaff distinguished those markets from one another by designing independent labels for each genre.

The vast collection of more than 25,000 LPs in the Northwestern Music Library supplied intriguing evidence of how differently record companies decided to market the same musical work or subject. The exhibit includes twelve striking variations of Bizet's opera "Carmen," and seven different versions of Rimsky-Korsakov's and Ravel's "Scheherazade" that range from a detail of a Chagall lithograph to a late-Sixties photo of a heavily eye-shadowed model in a harem outfit vaguely reminiscent of "I Dream of Jeannie."

The exhibit is free and open to the public during the Library's public hours (Monday-Friday, 8:30-5, Saturday 8:30-noon) and runs through September 10, 2009. It was curated by Music Library and Art Collection staffers Greg Macayeal, Stephanie Hewson, Lindsay King, Morris Levy, For more information, call 847-467-5918.