[Dixielandjazz] R.I.P. Alex Steinweiss

[Robert Ringwald]

Alex Steinweiss, Originator of Artistic Album Covers, Dies at 94
by Steven Heller
New York Times, July 20, 2011
Alex Steinweiss, an art director and graphic designer who brought custom artwork
to record album covers and invented the first packaging for long-playing records,
died on Sunday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 94. His death was confirmed by his son, Leslie.
The record cover was a blank slate in 1939, when Mr. Steinweiss was hired to design
advertisements for Columbia Records. Most albums were unadorned, and on those occasions
when art was used, it was not original. (Albums then were booklike packages containing
multiple 78 r.p.m. discs.)
"The way records were sold was ridiculous," Mr. Steinweiss said in a 1990 interview.
"The covers were brown, tan or green paper. They were not attractive, and lacked
sales appeal." Despite concern about the added costs, he was given the approval to
come up with original cover designs.
His first cover, for a collection of Rodgers and Hart songs performed by an orchestra,
showed a high-contrast photo of a theater marquee with the title in lights. The new
packaging concept was a success: Newsweek reported that sales of Bruno Walter's recording
of Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony increased ninefold when the album cover was illustrated.
"It was such a simple idea, really, that an image would become attached to a piece
of music," said Paula Scher, who designed record covers for Columbia in the 1970s
and is now a partner in the design company Pentagram. "When you look at your music
collection today on your iPod, you are looking at Alex Steinweiss's big idea."
Mr. Steinweiss preferred metaphor to literalism, and his covers often used collages
of musical and cultural symbols. For a Bartok piano concerto, he rejected a portrait
of Bartok, using instead the hammers, keys and strings of a piano placed against
a stylized backdrop. For a recording of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," he used an
illustration of a piano on a dark blue field illuminated only by an abstract street
lamp, with a stylized silhouetted skyline in the background.
Alex Steinweiss was born March 24, 1917, in Brooklyn. His father, a women's shoe
designer from Warsaw, and his mother, a seamstress from Riga, Latvia, emigrated to
the Lower East Side of Manhattan and eventually settled in the Brighton Beach section
of Brooklyn.
On the strength of his high school portfolio, Mr. Steinweiss earned a scholarship
to the Parsons School of Design. After graduation he worked for three years for the
Austrian poster designer Joseph Binder, whose flat color and simplified human figures
were popular at the time and influenced his own work.
During World War II Mr. Steinweiss became Columbia's advertising manager. He left
for a job at the Navy's Training and Development Center in New York City, where he
produced teaching materials and cautionary posters.
After the war, Mr. Steinweiss freelanced for Columbia. During one lunch meeting there,
the company's president, Ted Wallerstein, introduced him to an innovation that the
company was about to unveil: the long-playing record. But there was a problem. The
heavy, folded kraft paper used to protect 78 r.p.m. records left marks on the vinyl
microgroove when 33 1/3 r.p.m. LPs were stacked.
Mr. Steinweiss was asked to develop a jacket for the new format and, with help from
his brother-in-law, found a manufacturer willing to invest about $250,000 in equipment.
Mr. Steinweiss had the original patent for what became the industry packaging standard
(he did not develop the inner sleeve, only the outer package), but under his contract
with Columbia he had to waive all rights to any inventions made while working there.
Mr. Steinweiss left the music business at 55, when he realized his design ideas were
out of step with the rock era. He turned to his own art, making ceramic bowls and
pots and later paintings, often with a musical theme. In 1974 he and his wife moved
to Sarasota.
Mr. Steinweiss's wife of 71 years, Blanche, died in 2010. In addition to his son,
of Brooklyn, he is survived by a daughter, Hazel Steinweiss of Sarasota; six grandchildren;
and three great-grandchildren.
Mr. Steinweiss said he was destined to be a commercial artist. In high school he
marveled at his classmates who "could take a brush, dip it in some paint and make
letters," he recalled. "So I said to myself, if some day I could become a good sign
painter, that would be terrific!"

--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
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