Painter, furniture designer, colour theorist, glassmaker, writer, educator: Josef Albers was a man for all seasons. More surprising still, he also had a knack for designing album covers. A new exhibition, ‘Sonic Albers’, opening at David Zwirner’s 537 West 20th Street gallery sheds light on the artist’s lesser-known relationship to music and sonic phenomena through paintings, drawings, glassworks and other ephemera from throughout his career.
Albers’ foray into album art came late in his life at 71 years old, nearly a decade after he began his seminal Homage to the Square series. Command Records was established in 1959 by Enoch Light, a classically trained violinist, band leader and sound engineer with an exceptionally sophisticated approach to stereo recordings (his penchant for lengthy technical descriptions similarly resulted in the creation of the gatefold sleeve). He enlisted Charles E Murphy as design director, who in turn tasked his former Yale professor – none other than Albers – with a handful of the label’s earliest jacket designs.
Produced over three years between 1959 and 1961, Albers’ seven album sleeves for Command Records incorporated elements such as circles and grids of dots, highly uncommon in his practice. (These have only ever featured in the sandblasted glass door panels he designed for the Todd Theater in Chicago, and a series of Christmas and Happy New Year cards he produced with his wife Anni Albers for personal use – the latter of which are also on view at the New York exhibition). Albers echoed the avant-garde musical compositions with synaesthetic designs evocative of the tempos the percussion instruments featured on the track.