Mati Klarwein

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(Abdul) Mati Klarwein
Birth name Matias Klarwein
Born (1932-04-09)April 9, 1932
Hamburg, Germany
Died March 7, 2002(2002-03-07) (aged 69)
Deià, Majorca, Spain
Nationality Spanish
Field Painting, Drawing, Film
Training Academie Julian, the Beaux Arts, Paris
Movement Surrealism, Fantastic Realism, Visionary art, Psychedelic art
Works Annunciation (1961)
Grain of Sand (1963-65)
Bitches Brew (1969)
Aleph Sanctuary (1963-70)

Abdul Mati Klarwein (April 9, 1932 – March 7, 2002) was a painter best known for his works used on the covers of music albums.

Biography

Matias Klarwein was born in Hamburg, Germany. His mother Elsa Kuhne was an opera singer and his father Joseph Klarwein[1] was an architect with the Bauhaus movement. His family was of Jewish origin and they fled to the British Mandate of Palestine when he was two years old, after the rise of Nazi Germany. In 1948 when the territory became Israel, his family traveled to Paris. There Mati studied with Fernand Léger, after attending the École des Beaux-Arts. Klarwein traveled south to Saint-Tropez and met Ernst Fuchs, who would have a profound influence on his technique. Leaving France in the 1950s, Klarwein traveled widely and lived in many different countries, including Tibet, India, Bali, North Africa, Turkey, Europe and the Americas. He settled in New York City in the early 1960s for a while, meeting Jimi Hendrix and many other artists.

Much of Klarwein's most famous work is inspired by surrealism and pop culture, but also reflects his interest in non-Western deities, symbolism, and landscapes. The alleged connection between Klarwein and the so-called psychedelic art of the period is not entirely unfounded, as he has detailed his experience with LSD in his 1988 book Collected Works; however, Klarwein also explains that drugs were never his prime inspirational source,[2] and in one interview, denies their influence entirely. His extensive travels and wide interests (notwithstanding the fact that his style had fully developed before the "psychedelic era") are further support of his claims. Klarwein claims that his friend Timothy Leary once told him, based on the character of his paintings, that Klarwein "didn't need psychedelics".[3]

In his painting Grain of Sand (1963–1965), many disparate images are combined together in one massive, yet oddly coherent work. Klarwein's own words illuminate the work: "I projected it as a sort of painted musical comedy movie with a Sanskrit swinging cast of thousands, starring Marilyn Monroe, Anita Ekberg, Ray Charles, Pablo Picasso, Brigitte Bardot, Roland Kirk, Cannonball Adderley, Ahmed Abdul Malik, Wonderwoman, Delacroix's Orphan Girl at the Cemetery, Litri and his bullshit fighters, Lawrence of Arabia, Socrates, Dalí, Rama, Vishnu, Ganesh, the Zork and a Milky Way of playmates."[4]

Klarwein added "Abdul" (which means "servant" in Arabic) to his name in the late 1950s to express his sentiments about the hostility between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East: he felt that to understand each other better, every Jew should adopt a Muslim first name, and vice-versa.[5] In 1960, he approached jazz musician Yusef Lateef after a concert. Lateef, who had previously expressed interest in using Klarwein's work for a future album cover, saw that Klarwein was white, and turned away without a word.[6][nb 1]

Mati Klarwein's artwork for gatefold cover of Miles Davis's Bitches Brew.

Despite this unfortunate encounter, during the 1960s Klarwein's work would be appreciated and utilized on several records by some of the decade's most progressive musicians. Klarwein's painting Annunciation (1961) was seen in reproduction by the musician Carlos Santana, who subsequently used it as the cover image of his band Santana's second album Abraxas (1970). In the following years Klarwein produced comparably striking designs for the covers of two Miles Davis albums, Bitches Brew (1969) and Live-Evil (1971), as well as a portrait of Jimi Hendrix, which was supposed to have been used for the guitarist's collaboration album with big band leader Gil Evans, which never came to fruition due to the guitarist's death.[6] His painting Zonked (1970), originally planned for use on a Betty Davis album of the same name,[6] would later be used as the cover of a Last Poets album Holy Terror (1995). For a complete list of albums which feature Klarwein's art, see below. The association of his images with these very successful and widely admired counterculture musicians made Klarwein's work known outside the circle of lovers of contemporary art. Many of these paintings, and others, were included in Klarwein's first book Milk n' Honey (1973).

In the mid-1970s, Klarwein began a series of paintings which he referred to as "real-estate paintings" or "inscapes". In the late 1970s he collaborated with trumpeter Jon Hassell for a couple albums on Brian Eno's Ambient label; these albums used several of Klarwein's "inscapes" on their covers. Klarwein also contributed art to three albums by Per Tjernberg.[6]

During the 1980s and 1990s, Klarwein would occasionally search for cheap paintings at flea markets and "improve" them, painting over them or adding things at his whim. Klarwein made over a hundred of these "improved paintings" throughout his career.[6]

Klarwein is still best known for his art of the 1960s and 1970s, with its clear links to surrealism (Klarwein studied with Salvador Dalí and the Viennese Fantastic Realist Ernst Fuchs), popular psychedelic imagery, and religious art from a number of different traditions. He also worked more conventionally across a variety of genres including still life, landscape, and portrait.

He died of cancer on March 7, 2002, in Deià, on the Spanish island of Majorca.

Album covers

Bibliography

  • Milk n' Honey (1973) Harmony Books, New York
  • God Jokes (1976) Harmony Books, New York
  • Inscapes: Real-Estate Paintings (1983) Harmony Books, New York
  • Collected Works 1959-1975 (1988) Raymond Martin Press, Germany
  • A Thousand Windows and Improved Paintings: Bad Paintings Made Gooder (1995) Max Publishing, Spain
  • Improved Paintings 1979-2000 (2000) Max Publishing, Spain
  • Paradise Lost and Found (2005) Consell de Mallorca, Spain ISBN 84-96430-13-8
  • Mati & the Music - 52 Album Covers (2012) 213 Librairies, France ISBN 9788492480197

Notes

  1. ↑ Actually, the compound "abdul" means "servant of", and should be followed by one of the names of Allah, so this name is somewhat nonsensical and may even appear blasphemous to a Muslim.

References

  1. ↑ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Joseph_Klarwein
  2. ↑ Mati Klarwein: Collected Works 1959-1975; Harmony Books, New York, ©1988
  3. ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20070807204534/http://www.levity.com/mavericks/mati.htm Internet Archive: Mati Klarwein Interview
  4. ↑ Grain of Sand by Mati Klarwein - Surrealist and Visionary Art
  5. ↑ Really Fantastic: Glenn O'Brien on Mati Klarwein - Slant - Obituary
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 lush life: mati klarwein by Rob Young

External links

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