Got it Covered
While there are plenty of examples of contemporary artists being commissioned for album sleeves – Sonic Youth covers have included work by Richard Prince, Raymond Pettibon and Christopher Wool, while Talking Heads hired Robert Rauschenberg for Speaking in Tongues (1983) – I can’t think of so many bands that have used paintings from before the dawn of rock’n‘roll.
Last year there were two high-profile exceptions, neither of which I paid too much attention to until I saw that both had appeared on a list of 2008’s best album artwork. Topping the chart is the cover for Fleet Foxes’ self-titled debut, which is – somewhat surprisingly – a crop from Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs (1559).
As frieze‘s associate editor Dan Fox pointed out yesterday, it could be the cover for a Deutsche Grammophon recording of 12th-century Flemish plainsong – which was, I assume, exactly Fleet Foxes’ intention (or rather that of designers Dusty Summers, Sasha Barr and Robin Pecknold). The brief is easy to imagine: ‘Please cloak our lovingly crafted, close-harmonied hymnals with something, you know, old.’
So is this a new direction for mainstream indie bands, or is it further evidence that, as Adrian Shaughnessy argued in Cover Art By: New Music Graphics (2008), the album cover is a dying art form? The idea of awards for cover art itself feels somewhat anachronistic; record labels are yet to find a convincing way of packaging downloaded music.
Also on the list is the cover for Coldplay’s Viva La Vida (2008) which uses Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) (though the album title is a nod to Frida Kahlo). Here, Fleet Foxes‘ unintrusive copy is ignored in favour of enthusiastically daubed white paint. Ingres’ great rival certainly makes for a surprising match for a band that, according to a 2008 poll sponsored by hotel chain Travelodge, produce the music most likely to help people fall asleep. Indeed, on the day of the album’s release, rather than talking up the July Revolution of 1830, Chris Martin made this mild claim on the band’s website: ‘I hope there’s songs on there that will make a shit day slightly less shit, or a good day even better.’ My guess is that the image was either chosen to coincide with the band’s vaguely military-inspired restyle, or suggested by the album’s producer Brian Eno (whose Another Green World, 1975 used a detail from Tom Phillips’ After Raphael, 1973).
So are there many other precedents? The most obvious one that I can think of is Peter Saville’s use of A Basket of Roses (1890) by Henri Fantin-Latour for New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies (1983) – the title of which was, intriguingly, taken from a line that Gerhard Richter, whose Kerze, 1983 adorns Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, spray-painted on the outside of Cologne’s European Kunsthalle in 1981. The National Gallery, so the story goes, refused reproduction rights until Factory record label boss Tony Wilson pointed out that the painting was part of the national collection belonging to the people of Great Britain and that ‘the people wanted it’.
While there are plenty of examples of contemporary artists being commissioned for album sleeves – Sonic Youth covers have included work by Richard Prince, Raymond Pettibon and Christopher Wool, while Talking Heads hired Robert Rauschenberg for Speaking in Tongues (1983) – I can’t think of so many bands that have used paintings from before the dawn of rock’n‘roll.
Last year there were two high-profile exceptions, neither of which I paid too much attention to until I saw that both had appeared on a list of 2008’s best album artwork. Topping the chart is the cover for Fleet Foxes’ self-titled debut, which is – somewhat surprisingly – a crop from Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs (1559).
As frieze‘s associate editor Dan Fox pointed out yesterday, it could be the cover for a Deutsche Grammophon recording of 12th-century Flemish plainsong – which was, I assume, exactly Fleet Foxes’ intention (or rather that of designers Dusty Summers, Sasha Barr and Robin Pecknold). The brief is easy to imagine: ‘Please cloak our lovingly crafted, close-harmonied hymnals with something, you know, old.’
So is this a new direction for mainstream indie bands, or is it further evidence that, as Adrian Shaughnessy argued in Cover Art By: New Music Graphics (2008), the album cover is a dying art form? The idea of awards for cover art itself feels somewhat anachronistic; record labels are yet to find a convincing way of packaging downloaded music.
Also on the list is the cover for Coldplay’s Viva La Vida (2008) which uses Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) (though the album title is a nod to Frida Kahlo). Here, Fleet Foxes‘ unintrusive copy is ignored in favour of enthusiastically daubed white paint. Ingres’ great rival certainly makes for a surprising match for a band that, according to a 2008 poll sponsored by hotel chain Travelodge, produce the music most likely to help people fall asleep. Indeed, on the day of the album’s release, rather than talking up the July Revolution of 1830, Chris Martin made this mild claim on the band’s website: ‘I hope there’s songs on there that will make a shit day slightly less shit, or a good day even better.’ My guess is that the image was either chosen to coincide with the band’s vaguely military-inspired restyle, or suggested by the album’s producer Brian Eno (whose Another Green World, 1975 used a detail from Tom Phillips’ After Raphael, 1973).
So are there many other precedents? The most obvious one that I can think of is Peter Saville’s use of A Basket of Roses (1890) by Henri Fantin-Latour for New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies (1983) – the title of which was, intriguingly, taken from a line that Gerhard Richter, whose Kerze, 1983 adorns Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, spray-painted on the outside of Cologne’s European Kunsthalle in 1981. The National Gallery, so the story goes, refused reproduction rights until Factory record label boss Tony Wilson pointed out that the painting was part of the national collection belonging to the people of Great Britain and that ‘the people wanted it’.
