“Since the early days of Modernism, the interplay between art and music has given considerable impetus to the development of new art forms.” And so begins Barbara Johns’ highly illuminating essay about that very interplay, although she really could have given a tip of the hat to Alex Steinweiss who passed away this week at 94. A large contributor to 20th-century audio-visual culture, he revolutionized how albums were packaged and sold by simply putting covers on them. It’s hard to imagine nowadays, where image is everything and manipulated for the hard sell, but this innovation saw massive sales increases. As Eye magazine notes, “He was just as much a pioneer of corporate branding insofar as he gave a major recording company a distinctive identity.” Alex Steinweiss changed the way people saw music, forever.

Back in 1939, those hard shellacked 78s were covered in brown, tan or green paper and in the words of Alex (how auspicious of him!), “Who the hell’s going to buy this stuff? There’s no push to it. There’s no attractiveness. There’s no sales appeal. So I told them I’d like to start designing covers.’’ And he did—thousands of them. The art of the record sleeve had been born. His eye-catching covers, initially only for Columbia Records, used stylized imagery combining motifs from folk art, art deco and cubism as well as his own hand-drawn lettering. He single-handedly started a whole new design form and industry.

His account of starting out is fascinating, even inspiring and his influence is still with us. As Art Director for Columbia, he hired Jim Flora as a commercial artist who himself defined the 1940s-50s-era jazz album cover like no other. Today’s pop surrealists/low-brow artists such as Tim Biskup, Mark Ryden, Shag, Shepard Fairey, to name but a few, can trace their artistic evolution back to the Steinweiss/Flora era. Not to mention album art began to be taken seriously in other musical genres. Where would we be without classic rock covers of Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis, Peter Saville’s iconic images for Joy Division and New Order or the countless sleeve designers whose visions populate so many fabulous Best of and Worst of lists alike?

The Steinweiss legacy lives on, Taschen produced a weighty retrospective and an “art-star tribute exhibition” was shown not that long ago, acknowledging that these early commercial artists created something that deserved to be enjoyed on its own terms—as fine art. In the age of intangible downloads and music-streaming, long live Alex Steinweiss—the original music image-maker.