Vinyl records have always been a wonderful vehicle for the sounds they contain, but the book Art & Vinyl explores the role that vinyl has played as a canvas for modern and contemporary visual art.
This vibrant and glossy book is the first publication to fully delve into works of art made especially for an album, composer, or musician. The book contains reproductions of more than 200 LPs that range from the mid-20th century right up to the present. In this presentation, Art & Vinyl traces the relationship that the record album has had on artists, from Pablo Picasso’s 1949 “peace dove” printed on Paul Robeson’s Chante Pour La Paix (Singing For Peace) right down to Ed Ruscha, Marlene Dumas, Cy Twombly, Yoko Ono, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barbara Kruger, Sol LeWitt, Sophie Calle, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol’s works for musical albums.
Groundbreaking pieces such as Gerhard Richter’s oil painting on an imprint of Glenn Gould’s Bach: The Goldberg Variations in 1984 are also included, as is Jann Haworth and Peter Blake’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover for the Beatles, Lee Friedlander’s portrait of Miles Davis for In A Silent Way, Warhol’s iconic cover for the Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers, and Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of Patti Smith for Horses.
Not just reserved for the cover art, Art & Vinyl also includes albums of original recordings made by artists such as Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein, Jean Dubuffet, Christian Marclay, and Wolfgang Tillmans.