Fawning Over Jim Flora
The demise of record-album cover art makes me sad. Even really bad cover art was better than no album-cover art at all. And it sure beats the diminished imagery and unreadable type that passes for contemporary CD design. Once upon a time, as you know, pop-art giants photographed, illustrated, clipped, and constructed album covers that resonated as strongly as the music they embellished. Artists such as Storm Thorgerson (Pink Floyd), Cal Schenkel (the Mothers of Invention), Martin Sharp (Cream), and Stanley Mouse (Grateful Dead) created classic art that in retrospect seems inseparable from the classic rock inside.
If I had to pick a favorite cover designer, though, it would probably be Jim Flora, who worked as an illustrator and creative designer at Columbia Records from 1942 to 1950. Flora was a highly talented, primarily commercial artist who once claimed that his only goal was to create "a piece of excitement." Writer-DJ Irwin Chusid, digital image restorer Barbara Economon, and Fantagraphics Books have done a terrific job of keeping Flora's "hieroglyphic" montages and Paul Klee-like creations alive in two amazing books.
While The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora collects most of Flora's album covers and kid-lit illustrations, the recently published Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora gathers together all the miscellaneous paintings, sketches, woodcuts, brochures, and other items the pair discovered when Flora's family kindly allowed them to ransack the late artist's Connecticut storage facility. As Flora artistic heir JD King says in his introduction, "The drawings and paintings are, in essence, jazz music on paper or canvas."