Alex Steinweiss: The Man Who Made Music Visible
Picture a record shop at the end of the 1930s. There are no walls of colour and no faces looking back at you from the racks. The shelves hold rows of heavy, near-identical albums: bound books with paper sleeves inside, each sleeve holding a brittle 78 rpm disc. The spines carry an artist’s name in black or gold, and that’s about it. If you wanted Beethoven, you looked for the word “Beethoven”. Nothing on the package said what the music might feel like.
A few years later, those same shelves had started to look like a gallery of small posters. Much of that change came from one young man from Brooklyn named Alex Steinweiss.
A Brooklyn Apprenticeship
Steinweiss was born in Brooklyn on 24 March 1917. His father designed women’s shoes and had come from Warsaw, and his mother was a seamstress from Riga. At Abraham Lincoln High School he found an important teacher in Leon Friend, who ran an “Art Squad” of students who designed the school’s posters, signs and publications. Some of Steinweiss’s student work was already appearing in the trade press before he graduated.
A scholarship took him to Parsons School of Design. After that he spent about three years working for Joseph Binder, the Austrian poster designer who had brought the bold, flat look of Viennese commercial art to New York. Binder’s lessons stayed with Steinweiss for life: simplify the figure, trust a few strong colours, and make the image read from across a room.
The Marquee That Changed Everything
At the end of the decade, the American Record Corporation became Columbia Records under its new owner, CBS, and the label set up in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Steinweiss joined while still in his early twenties. He was hired to design advertisements and displays, and he is usually described as Columbia’s first art director. He soon fixed his attention on the packaging itself. Years later he summed up the old system bluntly: “The way records were sold was ridiculous.”
His proposal was simple and, to management, alarming. He wanted to print illustrated, full-colour artwork on the front of the albums. Four-colour printing cost money, and the executives were not convinced that a picture would sell a symphony.
His first cover, made around 1940, was for Smash Song Hits by Rodgers & Hart, a set of show tunes played by an orchestra. He didn’t draw a portrait of the composers. He photographed the marquee of the Imperial Theatre in Manhattan with the album’s title in lights, so the image had the buzz of opening night. It was a small idea that worked at once. The cover made the record feel like an event.
The figures that followed made the case for him. Newsweek reported that sales of Bruno Walter’s recording of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony rose ninefold once it was given an illustrated cover. Accounts of the exact numbers differ, but the direction was clear, and Columbia let its young designer carry on.
Thinking in Metaphors
Steinweiss’s covers rarely showed what was literally on the record, and that is where their charm lies. For a Bartók piano concerto he skipped the composer’s face and arranged parts of a piano into a near-abstract composition. For Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue he set a piano against a deep blue field with a city skyline, so the music’s restless Manhattan energy came through before anyone played a note.
He drew on European modernism, the poster tradition he had learned under Binder, and a cheerful sense of play. His shapes were flat and confident and his colours were saturated. The lettering often looked as if it was dancing across the cover. In the second half of the 1940s that lettering developed into a signature of its own, a looping, bouncy hand that became known as the “Steinweiss Scrawl” and was later made into a typeface.
His work wasn’t limited to illustration. He worked with photographers too, including Margaret Bourke-White. He also built a team: in 1942 he brought in the illustrator Jim Flora, whose wild, jangling jazz covers have since found a cult following of their own.
War, and a New Kind of Record
During the Second World War, Steinweiss worked for the US Navy in New York. He produced training materials and cautionary posters by day and kept up with Columbia work in the evenings. After the war, the label’s president Ted Wallerstein told him about a coming technology: the long-playing record, launched by Columbia in 1948.
The new discs created a practical problem. The kraft-paper sleeves used for 78s scuffed the delicate vinyl when LPs were stacked. Steinweiss was asked to find something better. With help from his brother-in-law he found a manufacturer willing to invest in new machinery, and he developed a sturdy paperboard jacket with a printed cover pasted on the front.
He held the original patent for that outer jacket, and it became the industry standard for decades. In other words, the square of card that would later carry Hipgnosis prisms and Warhol bananas began as Steinweiss’s solution to a scratching problem. Under his contract, though, he had to waive his rights to inventions made while working for Columbia, so the idea that shaped a whole industry made him very little money.
A Life in Roughly 2,500 Squares
Over more than three decades Steinweiss is credited with somewhere around 2,500 covers, for Columbia and later for Decca, London, Everest and others. His style changed with the decades. Photography became more important from the mid-1950s, and in the 1960s he experimented with die-cuts and collage. By the early 1970s he felt out of step with the rock era. In his mid-fifties he stepped away from record design and turned to his own art, first ceramic bowls and pots and later paintings, many of them on musical themes.
He died in Sarasota, Florida, in July 2011, aged 94. By then the design world had caught up with him. He was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1998, and the Alex Awards for album art were named in his honour in 2003. Taschen published a large monograph in 2009, with a title that called him “The Inventor of the Modern Album Cover”.
Was He Really the First?
That title deserves a small asterisk. When he died, some record historians pointed out that a handful of illustrated jazz albums had appeared before his Columbia work. The collector Cary Ginell put it gently: Steinweiss was “an inventive, talented, and colorful artist”, but not the sole originator of the idea.
Still, the asterisk doesn’t change much. Others may have tried the idea first, but Steinweiss made it standard practice. He persuaded a major label that a picture could sell music, then made thousands of them, and then designed the very jacket that every later cover would sit on.
Why He Still Matters
Next time you flick through a crate of vinyl, or scroll past a tiny square of album art on your phone, think of that Imperial Theatre marquee. The designer Paula Scher, who made Columbia covers in the 1970s, said that whenever we look at our music collections, “you are looking at Alex Steinweiss’ big idea.” It is hard to think of a better tribute. He wanted people to see the music before they heard it, and they still do every day.
