Robert Weaver
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This is more than a cover illustration depicting the legendary Charlie Parker playing the saxophone.
It's an inventive graphic design concept from trailblazing illustrator Robert Weaver.
By
showing the subject in two parts. The artwork's visual idea is as
radical as Parker's music. A wide shot and a close-up butted together
dynamically communicates an energetic motion and movement in a still
image.
Signed lower right.
Record album cover illustration for
Charlie Parker: Bird with Strings Live at the Apollo, Carnegie Hall and
Birdland (Columbia Records, 1976).
From Wikipedia:
Robert Weaver (July 5, 1924 – September 4, 1994)
was an American illustrator who was considered a pioneer of a
contemporary approach to the field that began in the 1950s.
Biography
Beginning
in 1952, he embarked on a mission to combine the visual ideas found in
fine art with the responsibility of journalist. At the time, many
practitioners of illustration were expected to paint and draw for
advertising and magazine assignments with artwork that was conservative,
idealized and saccharine, while other illustrators such as Ronald
Searle, Arthur Szyk, George Grosz, Kathe Kollwitz and later Ralph
Steadman and Tomi Ungerer injected their own opinion into the matter.
Weaver joined this latter tradition by moving his role of an illustrator
from a page decorator to a journalist. He ventured from the typical
haven of an illustrator's studio into the world and used a pencil to
observe, record facts, and draw real life based visual essays, the way
that illustrators such as Burt Silverman and Franklin McMahon did. This
approach would later be termed "visual journalism" and in 1983 would
form the basis of a special masters degree, Illustration as Visual
Essay, from the School of Visual Arts in New York.
He died at his home in Manhattan on September 4, 1994
Career and legacy
In
an article for the AIGA in 1990, noted graphic art historian Steve
Heller categorized Weaver as a journalistic illustrator. Other artists
included Bob Gill, Jack Beck, Robert Andrew Parker, Thomas B. Allen and
Philip Hays. They received crucial assignments from a group of visionary
art directors that included Cipe Pineles, Leo Lionni, Otto Storch and
Henry Wolf.
For five decades, Weaver created work for clients such as Esquire, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Life, Look, The New York Times and Columbia Records. These patrons allowed him to cover stories with the same mission afforded a photojournalist, such as the time he covered John F. Kennedy's campaign. He illustrated using pencil and acrylic paint on paper. br Known for bringing the narrative qualities of cinematic storytelling to his profession, Weaver once said, "Life is not a single snapshot, it is a series of events that are chain linked and proceed frame by frame."