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Paul Bacon
Paul Bacon (1923-2015)
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Paul Bacon, one of the most highly regarded and imaginative book and jazz-album cover designers of the 1950s and beyond who is probably best known for his covers of Catch 22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest and Portnoy's Complaint as well as art-directed jackets for early Blue Note releases and then Riverside LPs, died on June 8 in Beacon, N.Y. He was 91. [Photo of Paul Bacon in 2002 by Hank O'Neal] In the early 1950s, Paul was at ...
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Interview: Paul Bacon (Part 4)
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
I should have told you this from the start but Paul Bacon has had a second career that has been even bigger than his first. Paul is perhaps best known today not as an LP-cover art director but as the inventor of book jacket design as we know it. Starting in the late 1950s, he has designed more than 7,000 covers, many of which were bestsellers, including Catch-22, Portnoy's Complaint, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Andromeda Strain and ...
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Interview: Paul Bacon (Part 3)
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
In the early years of LP cover design, there were no rules. The only driving force was that a cover had to be graphically gripping. Designers then often worked with just two colors, and much rested on typeface solutions and the integration of motion, dimension and excitement. As one of the early jazz-album cover designers and art directors, Paul Bacon was free to follow his artistic instincts and invent a fresh, new cover look. But Paul was also on ...
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Interview: Paul Bacon (Part 2)
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Paul Bacon is modest and soft-spoken. Since the late 1940s, jazz musicians have sensed in the album illustrator, designer and art director a wise and gentle soul. This was particularly true of Thelonious Monk, who saw Paul as an unpretentious artist and sensitive thinker. For his part, Paul saw in Monk a creative genius who was impervious to conformity and allergic to hidden agendas. Paul felt strongly from their first meeting in early 1948 that Monk was everything a jazz ...
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Interview: Paul Bacon (Part 1)
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Even if the name Paul Bacon doesn't ring a bell, his covers for more than 200 jazz albums will. Paul helped set the mood and mystique for modern jazz back in the early 1950s at the dawn of the LP jacket. Back then, Paul was the illustrator and art director of many early Blue Note albums and became Riverside's art director until the 1960s, when he went on to an even more illustrious career as a book-cover designer. [Photo of ...
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