I must admit that in the sixties I didn’t know much about Marte Röling (born in Amsterdam in 1939, two years younger than your record collector, and a Knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion since January 2010). I had had drawing lessons from the nice father of conferencier Paul van Vliet at the lyceum Zandvliet in The Hague, but his strong efforts were completely wasted on me and did not encourage my interest in art.    

Luckily my work brought me in narrow contact with the world of graphics and I realized that art is an indispensable part of human existence. Today some 80,000 covers in my record collection are proof of a graphical wonder world I cannot appreciate high enough. They are applicable art in optima forma. The Picasso-styled covers by Marte Röling are a striking example of that cover art.

Marte Röling does not make you worry about things like usefulness or application. She made silkscreen prints of Queen Beatrix and Prince Claus -or recent in fifty five fold paintings of her late husband Henk Jurriaans-, all straight and recognizable. Maybe that made her a good designer of record covers. Covers have the advantage they date and interpret or catalogue themselves through the music as a product of its time. Covers are frozen music. The covers that Marte Röling made for the Fontana label half way the sixties immediately catch your eye when you see them. Marte Röling, then aged 25 and just after an exhibition at the Paris Biennale, sketches the free jazz of the sixties by filling up the artist’s brains with their ‘free spirits’. She makes visible what the musicians feel and hear in their music with powerful Picasso-like lines.

Marte silkscreen printed around 12 or 14 of these covers. We would wish she made more of these strong contributes to the world of music and art.

I am happy with the opportunity to show the eight covers I collected through the years at the exposition ‘100 years of Dutch Graphic Design’. From October 25th 2010 till April 25th 2011.

Marius Quist, record collector.  

maquist@kpnmail.nl

When the Graphic Design Museum asked me to select 8 graphical covers from my record collection I spontaneously chose for the record covers designed by Cornelius van Velsen (Hilversum 1921-2010).

During the last two years a mutual personal friend, who often visited Cornelius at his home in Hilversum, told me about him, his work, his life and, sadly, his last disease. Sometimes I spoke to Cornelius on the telephone, mostly about his favorite music, jazz. In the end I met him when his poster exposition opened in the Affichemuseum in Hoorn, November 2009. Though he never saw me before, he recognized me immediately with his sharp eye. An eye betraying why the graphic art had chosen him, maybe even before he had chosen for graphic art himself. What I saw in his eyes was the art of observing, this see-through-your-face, and the how-would-I-draw-you-look. On January 5^th, 2010 our Dutch master of record covers and posters left us for good, 88 years of age.

The covers I chose for ‘my’ show-window in the Graphic Design Museum perfectly match with his famous Joy-poster that hangs in the same room at some meters distance. The Joy-poster yields as the graphic icon of the museum; this is how a poster should look.

From the fifties on, Cornelius van Velsen was an important creator of the Dutch cover design. In those days Holland functioned as a cradle for the continental European record production.  In America illustrated record covers were already an important feature of the presentation of records, especially as a result of the work by Alex Steinweiss, nicknamed ‘the father of the record cover’. Holland would follow this trend, both nationally and internationally, not with American cover design but with our own Dutch creations. 

Cornelius van Velsen was one of the most creative Dutch designers of them all. He illustrated hundreds of covers, mostly in that happy post-war forties/fifties style. You can almost smell the Liberation of 1945.  His painting for the Jazz Box became stylish for his work. His jazz feel is illustrated in the four jazz covers I selected: playful, vivacious, colorful and original. And what is funnier than those Family Frolics? The cover for Stravinsky’s Firebird is a color play of flaming red and yellow, but look closely, with white bird paws. Note the contours of the brown people of “Swing low in hi-fi” painted in white on the brown underground (a linoleum cut?).

Cornelius van Velsen was not less famous for his posters. Catchy posters, immediately recognizable when hanging in the streets, one word should be enough, he made 170 of them. His style can be compared with the work of Abram Games in the UK.

But photography gradually ousted this graphical style from the market. It happened to Alex Steinweiss in the States, to Abram Games in the UK, and it happened also to Cornelius van Velsen in Holland.  A kind of revenge came for Cornelius van Velsen during the nineties when he got the opportunity to make more than a hundred covers for compact discs with classical avant-garde music. Nice items to look for.

See the Van Velsen covers from April 26th till July 26th 2010 among many other examples of  skillful design during “100 Years of Dutch Graphic Design”.

Marius Quist, April 2010.

That’s why infographics are such a strong communication tool and are present (in multitude) in our lives.

Below you can see a small selection of infographics from the collection of the Graphic Design Museum.  It is a broad spectrum in which both a simple pie chart and an exploded view drawing are represented.  

Marius Quist has collected thousands of interesting and beautiful lp covers, and is still collecting. His collection is ubiquitous: there are covers with photography, airbrushed covers, covers from Dutch bands or singers, psychedelic covers, black and white covers, et cetera.
We are very pleased that we can select covers from Marius’s collection for our exhibition 100 Years of Dutch Graphic Design. LP covers form an interesting chapter of the history of Graphic Design. Marius explains how important cover design is…

Jan Toorops beroemdste affiche voor slaolie is in honderd jaar uitgegroeid van reclame naar kunstobject. Precies die verschuiving van gebruiksvoorwerp naar kunstvoorwerp zien wij nu bij cover art.
De platencover kan mooi zijn al houd je niet van de muziek. Los van de muziek is de cover cultuurdrager van grafische kunst in de twintigste eeuw. Talloze ontwerpers, schilders, illustrators en tekenaars gebruikten de platencover om hun vakmanschap te etaleren. Warhol, Huf, Buffet, Avedon, Dali, to name a few.

Deze kunstwerkjes op 1000 cm² ben ik gaan verzamelen. Veel is zeldzaam, veel is voor iedereen bereikbaar. Kijk naar Milton Glaser. Grafisch ontwerper. Hij ontwierp I ♥ NY. Hij ontwierp ook het logo van labels als Tomato en Elektra. Zijn hoezenwerk gaat van Townes van Zandt tot Strawinsky. Of kent u de hoes van ‘Draw the line’ van Aerosmith? Dan weet u hoe tekeningen van Al Hirschfeld eruit zien. Subtiel penwerk van Klaus Voormann siert ‘When we was fab’ van George Harrison, the silent Beatle. Cover art wijst u de weg van de muziek- naar de kunstafdeling.

Nederlandse kunstenaars lopen al vanaf de fifties voorop bij cover art. Het is Nationaal Kunstbezit. Reeksen USA-platen verschenen hier met hoezen van Nederlandse ontwerpers als Dick Elffers en Cornelius van Velsen. Later zien we covers van bijvoorbeeld Jaap Drupsteen, Gielijn Escher of Joost Swarte. Bekend zijn de fotohoezen van Paul Huf en Anton Corbijn. De hoezenkunst valt samen met een halve eeuw wereldhistorie van de opbouwjaren vijftig tot tsunami of 9/11, alles in een bonte stoet van stijlen en technieken. Ontwerpers hebben net als musici een antenne voor dit alles. Dit maakt cover art zo boeiend.

A small selection from the collection of Marius Quist is exposed at this moment in 100 Years of Dutch Graphic Design in the Graphic Design Museum. Until the 26th of April 2010 you can find in this exhibition eight covers with photography by Paul Huf.

Another selection, with more lp covers, is shown until the 7th of March 2010 in the exhibition DiscCoverArt in the Grafisch Museum in Groningen.

Recently the Graphic Design Museum acquired new objects to extend the collection of the museum. A couple of these posters will be featured in the “100 Years of Dutch Graphic Design” exhibition starting the 25th of January 2010.

So via this blog we give you a sneak peak of the new objects.

Speaking of Citroën advertising (see the post about Suyling): you have to look at these interesting collections of car ephemera!

Advertisements designed by Suyling:
http://www.citroenami6.nl/suyling.html

… and much more car graphics:
http://www.citrobe.org/folders.htm
http://www.thesamba.com/vw/archives/ads/
http://www.mijnautofolders.nl/

Oh, and there is much more. Cars are great to look at and to design for!
Another example of car graphics on Flickr: car type!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/feltron/sets/72057594075645138/

And finally, I forgot this one:
http://www.oldcarbrochures.com/main.php

   

Recently the tv show “Tussen Kunst en Kitsch visited the Graphic Design museum. Over 1.000 visitors came to have their objects valued and to learn more about them. Of course everybody secretly hoped to own a Rembrandt, a Ming vase or another extremely valuable object.

A very interesting aspect of this day were the packages that visitors used to carry their objects into the museum.
And since it’s almost Sinterklaas and Christmas, we have made a Package Parade to get into the festive mood!

Most visitors brought their object in large shoppers.

But some objects just won’t fit in one of those shoppers..
So people got very creative with sleeping bags and plaids.

Even the cakes and coffee had to move over for the valuable goods

Fashionable visitors were also present.

Recycling old tv-boxes: a very splendid and green idea!

The trolleys were also present in all shapes and sizes

The owner of these objects had spent a couple of hours looking for the right packaging material and at last he found this lovely suitcase.

We wonder what happened to the “Super trainer”

I vividly remember being offended throughout my high-school education because ‘atoms’ where consistently presented as these perfect slick round little spheres. At one time I even called the teacher a fabricator of lies and shouted: “Atoms aren’t balls!!”.

Of course the poor man couldn’t help it, as it was just decided to teach us high-school kids a outdated, simplified 19th century version of the atom model, rather than confusing us with subatomic particles like protons, neutron, up-quarks, down-quarks, gluons and what do you have nowadays.

In retrospect I was just a kid trying to be witty after having flipped through some of the science magazines of my dad, who was a physicist. Nonetheless, I always remained keen on the underestimated role of simulations in modern science.

Are you still reading? Then this call for proposals might be for you. The STRP Festival, Institute of Complex Molecular Systems, and Animation Studio invite artists, designers and scientists to develop a new visual language for molecular structures.

“Recently, a new problem has emerged for molecular scientists. For many decennia they have used a world-wide accepted way of representing molecules, even though these molecules have never really been seen. Unfortunately, this language is not suitable to represent the increasing complexity of the molecular systems and dynamic processes that are subject of modern research. … We think that a breakthrough in this area is only possible with ideas of people with different specialisms.”

Download the full Call for Proposals (pdf).

Written by Koert van Mensvoort

Via NextNature.

Although it exists for less than 20 years, online search has become such a commonplace activity it is hard to imagine life without it. For your grandparents it didn’t exist. But now you can send them a postcard. Via www.nextnature.net