Review: Storm Thorgerson's 'Mind over Matter: The Images of Pink Floyd' Fifth Edition

Storm Thorgerson belongs to a very exclusive club of well-known album cover artists. Honestly, the only other one I can think of is Roger Dean, and just as Dean is closely associated with one band (Yes), Thorgerson is renowned as the photographer behind the light-refracting prism, the flaming handshake, and the field of hospital beds. Although he created covers for groups as varied as Def Leppard and The Cranberries, Thorgerson will always be remembered as Pink Floyd's favorite coverman.

Review: 'Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s'

The mutual explosion of sci-fi and cheap paperbacks in the seventies necessitated a similar boom in sci-fi art. Near household names like Ralph McQuarrie, Roger Dean, Frank Frazetta, Robert McCall, and Alan Aldridge helped fulfill industry needs with nearly photorealistic depictions of otherworldly worlds, freaky tech, weird monsters, and excessively sinewed and/or buxom humanoids. The art adorning books by the likes of Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, and Ellison were often selling points as major as the words within. Some of it was garish or tacky, but even the most ghastly covers displayed a wealth of imagination and technique. A good deal of it was truly beautiful.

Review: 'It Must Be Art! Big O Poster Artists of the 60s & 70s'

Poster art made the big leap from the purely commercial to the voguishly decorative in the mid-sixties when hippies started decorating their groovy pads with brain-blistering images originally intended to attract flocks to Dylan concerts or other assorted happenings. During this period, infamous counterculture magazine OZ gave birth to a poster business with the express intent of enticing flower children to wallpaper their dorms with affordable images from the likes of Martin Sharp, Roger Dean, and Heinz Edelman, in essence transforming graphic art into something more personal. Big O Posters hawked its wares from 1967 into the punk era, when decidedly un-flowery artists such as H.R. Giger got in on the fun.

It Must Be Art! Big O Poster Artists of the 60s & 70s tells the story of the company, profiles nineteen of its most significant artists, and most importantly by a great distance, presents many of its posters and other artworks by the profiled artists in full color and at large scales. The art towers above all else both because it is outrageously striking by design and because much of the text is not that interesting. Roger Dean may have produced some truly iconic fantasy images, but he’s kind of a dull dude. The same is true of most of the graphic artists who often tell their own stories via dry interviews. There are a few exceptions when too much acid (David Vaughan), awful wartime experiences (Virgil Finley), or proximity to the infinitely more exciting pop world (Edelman, who designed Yellow Submarine seemingly against his will, and Sharp, who co-wrote “Tales of Brave Ulysses” and created some Cream album covers) intervene. Witchy Vali Myers is the rare artist in this book who makes for interesting text on personality alone, and not just because she’s the only woman who cracked its all-too-typical Boys Club.

But no one is going to pick up It Must Be Art! for its words. While some of the artwork is indescribably ugly (Brad Johannsen’s “Parson’s Crazy Eyes”) or tacky (pretty much everything by Robert Venosa), there’s also a lot of cool stuff in a wide variety of styles. The best of it captures psychedelia at its most garish without losing focus: Sharp’s intricate graphic designs, Dean’s prog dreamscapes, Ivan Ripley’s nursery décor, Rudolph Hausner’s bold and grim surrealism, Graham Percy’s tactile cuteness, Virgil Finlay’s pointillistic intricacies, Wayne Anderson’s mellow, gnomish fairy tales. There are also neat spreads devoted to Yellow Submarine and Giger’s Alien.

Review: 'The Art of British Rock: 50 Years of Rock Posters, Flyers, and Handbills'

As Rock & Roll progressed radically throughout the sixties, so did the way it was packaged, from the groovy new record sleeves to the posters and flyers that advertised them and concerts. The latter advances are on vivid display in writer Mike Evans and designer Paul Palmer-Edwards’s new book The Art of British Rock: 50 Years of Rock Posters, Flyers, and Handbills. We begin with the kinds of block-letter, boxing-style posters that unimaginatively announced concerts in the pre-British invasion age, but quickly whisk along with the eye-blasting pop art and art nouveau styles of the psychedelic age. The prog, punk, new wave, brit pop, and contemporary eras follow on a wave of wild variety.

A lot of books like this make the mistake of trying to cram in too much, shrinking the art for the sake of quantity. Palmer-Edwards is more concerned with quality, giving us large-scale representations of some amazingly detailed works that really require keen attention. Stripped of all their original commercial intentions, many of these pieces are as artistically conceived as the finest pop, op, and graphic arts hanging in any museum. And while a lot of Rock art books allow the art to do almost all of the talking, Evans's captions provide valuable information about the artists, the techniques, and the tools that brought these works into being. There are also full-page profiles of the most significant artists, including Roger Dean, the Hipgnosis team, Barney Bubbles, Jamie Reid, and Vaughn Oliver, while Rock’s most visually-striking band, The Who, receive special attention throughout. And is it just me or is the Fairport Convention poster on page 71 clearly the inspiration for Castle Grayskull?