CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/18/2013

'Old All-Stars Who Still Dazzle the Eye' in the New York Times

In today's New York Times Paper Gallery column, Dana Jennings reviews "Old All-Stars Who Still Dazzle the Eye," including two books from the ARTBOOK | D.A.P. list.

"Glen Canyon Dam, Page, Arizona, 1983," by Joel Sternfeld, is reproduced from American Prospects.

Below are Jennings' reviews of Mati Klarwein, "whose album covers shimmer with a cryptic hippie cool that seduced Miles Davis and Carlos Santana" and Joel Sternfeld, "whose reissued photographs snap us back to the dingy grays and ochers of the early 1980s."
"Sometimes you just need to tip your cap to the all-stars," Jennings writes, "the perennial crowd pleasers whose work stays in print year after year, whose worth still spurs debate decades after their deaths and whose images inescapably show up on the walls of college dorm rooms and your finer dive bars."

MATI & THE MUSIC: 52 Record Covers 1955/2005
Text by Serge Bramly
184 pages. RM/Librairie 13. $45.

Mati Klarwein liked to call himself the most famous unrecognized artist in the world. That’s a fair self-call given that he painted two of the 1970s’ enduring pop-culture images, the album covers of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and Carlos Santana’s Abraxas. The Santana sums up Klarwein’s style: Sculptural figures are set in a hypersurreal phantasmagoria that seems to reflect some groovy non-Western mythology, all complemented by an ample supply of bared breasts. (Klarwein was a master of the gratuitous breast.) Other covers include albums by Jimi Hendrix (below), the Last Poets, Gregg Allman — and, oh, Leonard Bernstein.

"Hendrix" (ca. 1974) is reproduced from MATI & THE MUSIC

JOEL STERNFELD: American Prospects
140 pages (unnumbered). D.A.P. $125.

In the late 1970s and early ’80s Joel Sternfeld crisscrossed the country, from Beverly Hills, Calif., to Aroostook County, Me., capturing Thoreau’s lives of quiet desperation whipsawed by the American dream in transition. One of the most powerful images here is of a potato harvest (below). A bone-weary girl waits on a barrel of potatoes on a gray Maine day. The horizon looms before her, but rather than being limitless it seems as if it means to crush her. American Prospects, first issued in 1987, is an essential document in understanding both 20th- and 21st-century America.

"Potato Harvest, Aroostook County, Maine, October 1982," by Joel Sternfeld, is reproduced from American Prospects.