The Walrus - Music With Big Fuckin' Teeth!

02/25/2008

VISUAL NOTES: Album Covers Inspired by Famous Paintings

Currently in storage at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

If you are a band planning to release an album, and you're lacking in visual artist friends...look no further than the closest art museum!

I spotted a photo of a Bow Wow Wow album cover in an new edition of The Oxford History of Western Art that was an "interpretation" of Manet's "Picnic on the Grass", and committed this ridiculous and awesome idea to memory.

CHALLENGE: Scour The Internet for apparent match-ups between famous dead painters and rock stars.

THE RESULTS:

Théodore Géricault - Raft of the Medusa, 1819

The Pogues - Rum, Sodomy & The Lash (1985, WEA Records)

Edouard Manet - Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863

Bow Wow Wow - See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy! (1981, RCA)

Robert Rauschenberg - White Painting, 1951

The Beatles - The White Album (1968, Apple Records)

VISUAL NOTES is brought to you by Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - a clothing company that hires innovative, contemporary artists to design exceptional and wearable pieces that combat the troubling possibility of artwork losing its presence and power in our image-saturated society.