Andy Warhol may be most famous for silk-screening soup cans, making boring home movies and getting shot, but some of the late artist's most popular work probably resides in your record collection. Warhol's iconic images grace no less than 50 album covers, ranging from obscure jazz and spoken-word titles to seminal pop albums by the Velvet Underground, the Rolling Stones, Diana Ross, the Smiths and Aretha Franklin. To celebrate the "Warhol Live" retrospective that opens Saturday and runs through May 17 at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, we have a look at some of his finest forays into the LP rack.
The Joe Newman Octet: "I'm Still Swinging"
(1956) While Warhol's quirky ink drawings started appearing on classical and world-music albums as early as 1949, it wasn't until he started getting commissioned jazz covers for Count Basie and Artie Shaw that his sly sensibility came to the surface. This one, for trumpet soloist Joe Newman, contains one of Warhol's earliest attempts at collage art, even if it was done simply to please the suits at RCA, who were used to seeing their musicians' pictures on album sleeves.
Kenny Burrell: "Blue Lights, Volumes 1 and 2"
(1958) With this two-volume Blue Note set by guitarist Kenny Burrell, Warhol finally broke away from simply drawing close-ups of musicians and their instruments and delivered a piece of art as evocative as the music inside. Among the curves and dips, it also reveled in his long-running fetish for high heels.
"The Velvet Underground & Nico"
(1967) Warhol's biggest artistic statement in the music world echoed the Campbell's soup cans that made him famous. He once again takes an ordinary item from the grocery store and blows it up bigger than life with dramatic results. On first printings, fans who followed the instructions to "peel slowly and see" by removing the banana-skin sticker were rewarded with an image of the fruit inside. Better still, while the cover prominently featured Warhol's name, there was no mention of the band anywhere, which could explain why, before it became recognized as such a coveted piece of rock history, the album sold just 5,000 copies.
The Rolling Stones: "Sticky Fingers"
Source: http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-02-08/entertainment/17187065_1_andy-warhol-soup-cans-drawings
