Andy Warhol: The Record Covers 1949-1987
by

Famous for much more than 15 minutes

Reams have been written about Warhol’s ultra-iconic design for The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, but he had been designing album sleeves for over 20 years before Mick and Keith came calling. Published to coincide with an exhibition touring North America throughout 2009, this classy coffee table tome serves as both a history of the artist’s development and potted biographies of the folk who made the records.

Marechal insists that, even at the start, Warhol would only take on commissions of product that appealed to him, opting for watercolours on a 1954 recording of Rossini’s William Tell Overture and sketchy line drawings on a 1960 spoken word release by Tennessee Williams. His work for Count Basie and Artie Shaw arguably set a template that many jazz artists still favour today. Like the pages on the Stones sleeve, there’s little new information about the equally celebrated Velvet Underground banana design, while 80s creations for Aretha Franklin and Liza Minnelli suggest he was becoming bored and repetitive. Elsewhere, however, we’re offered irrefutable evidence that there was always a lot more to Warhol than soup cans and silk screens.

4 stars 4 stars 4 stars 4 stars

ISBN 9783791340869, 280 pages

Reviewed by Terry Staunton
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