Alex Steinweiss : Biography

Alex Steinweiss

Radhika Kumar

“INVENTOR OF MODERN ALBUM COVER”

Radhika Kumar

Steinweiss’s idea was to use original
artwork (drawings and paintings) on
the front of the albums specifically
related to the recorded work(s).

Radhika Kumar

Mr. Steinweiss preferred metaphor
to literalism, and his covers often
used collages of musical and cultur-
al symbols.

Radhika Kumar

For a recording of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody
in Blue,” he used an abstract street lamp
for illumination.

Radhika Kumar

Radhika Kumar

Radhika Kumar

During World War II Mr. Steinweiss
became Columbia’s advertising

manager.

Radhika Kumar

Radhika Kumar

“I love music so much and I had such ambition that I
was willing to go way beyond what the hell they paid me for.
I wanted people to look at the artwork and hear the music.”

—Alex Steinweiss

Radhika Kumar

Radhika Kumar

Radhika Kumar

Over three decades, Steinweiss made
thousands of original artworks for
classical, jazz, and popular record cov-
ers as well as logos, labels, advertising
material, even his own typeface, the
‘Steinweiss Scrawl.’

Radhika Kumar

Radhika Kumar

Radhika Kumar “His images are lively, playful, boundlessly inventive and
seem almost to throb with the spirit and emotion of the
classical music he loved.”
—Rick Poynor, review of For the Record: The Life and
Work of Alex Steinweiss, Financial Times Weekend Mag-
azine

“He is an alert, energetic, twentieth century personality.
He is charged with ambition—an ambition that is con-
trolled and directed by a cool logical mind, and which
has an enormous capacity for work at its service. Add to
that an innate talent for design and you have a combina-
tion that almost assures success. That success is abundant
and has come early, but to Steinweiss it is a by-product.”
—Henry C. Pitz, The American Artist