Visualizing Music: The Beatles’ Album Covers
Thesis (Masters in Art History)
Having always been interested in the links between music and the visual arts, I decided to conduct my Masters thesis for my art history research program on album cover art. I had always been particularly intrigued by the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club band, created by pop artist Peter Blake, which was the most expensive and elaborate album cover ever made at the time of its release in 1967. After a preliminary research, I discovered that many of the Beatles’ album covers had fascinated not only their contemporaries, but artists and fans decades later, and continue to captivate fans worldwide. Even today, thousands of fans still go to Abbey Road every day to attempt to recreate the cover of the Beatles' Abbey Road album, which has become one of the most iconic images of popular culture. I also discovered that the Beatles were one of the first groups to collaborate with artists from the fine arts realm to create their covers, and were themselves deeply involved in the creation of those covers. I also noticed a striking contrast between the Beatles’ album covers from the beginning of their career, and those produced towards the end.
This lead me to pose a series of questions: What are the links between the musical creation of the Beatles’ albums, and the visual creation of their covers? How did these links evolve throughout the group’s career? Why had the Beatles’ album covers had such a wide impact, and how did they become an integral part of popular culture? How were these images born, what do they mean, and in what ways do they reflect both the music of the Beatles and the socio-cultural contexts of the 1960s in which they were created? Why were different visual techniques used for different covers? If the Beatles are often considered as the most influential group in the modern era and the one that revolutionized popular music, in what ways did the innovations that they apparently brought to the album cover relate to those they brought to popular music?
The thesis therefore studies the Beatles’ album covers throughout their career, from 1963 to 1970, and analyzes these images in relation to the musical creation of the Beatles, as well as the cultural and social contexts that shaped their aesthetic. This research attempts to demonstrate that the Beatles initiated a new approach to graphic design and visual art in the field of music, by giving a visual dimension to their musical creation and by becoming pioneers in the exploration of the links between music and image, thus elevating the album cover from the status of commercial object to that of an art form.
The album covers are analyzed chronologically according to 4 periods in the Beatles’ career, which constitute the four chapters of the thesis. The first chapter analyzes the group’s album covers during the first 2 years of their career (a.k.a. Beatlemania), in which their musical and visual creation was heavily shaped by commercial and advertising incentives. The second chapter examines the Beatles’ covers during the transitional part of their career, where both their music and visual identity undergo an important transformation and experimentation. The third chapter tackles the covers from the psychedelic era of 1966 and 1967, characterized by the immersion of the group in the hippie movement, their experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and the increasing involvement of artists from the fine arts in the creation of their covers. Finally, the last chapter analyzes the covers from the Beatles' post-psychedelic period, from 1968 till the end of their career, which is marked by a strong break from the psychedelic aesthetic and a return to a musical and visual simplicity.
You can read my full thesis (in french) here.
