The Art of the Cover
From the mid 50s to the 60s, Solitaire Records, a small Toronto record company, engaged the talents of some of Canada's most prominent contemporary designers and artists to illustrate its covers.
Included in this marketing program were graphic designers Theo Dimson, Carl Dair, and Clair Stewart, and artists Oscar Cahen, Walter Yarwood, and Tom Hodgson - members of Toronto's Painters Eleven - and Ross Mendes who taught at the Ontario College of Art.
The idea of using cover art to attract customers originated in the US with Columbia Records and its in-house designer Alex Steinweiss who first applied art to the covers of Columbia's multi-record albums in 1939. When Columbia's invented the 12" LP in 1948, Steinweiss again pioneered the application of art to the new LP format, a practice that was immediately embraced by the industry, thus launching an art form that endures today.
With few homegrown Canadian record companies in the decade following WW2, opportunities for cover designers here were limited. In the early 50s, Alfred Pellan and other artists designed album covers for the CBC's International Service; Arnaud Maggs and Allan Harrison, both living in New York at the time, designed catchy covers for Columbia.
But it wasn't until Solitaire's arrival on the scene in the mid 50s that consumers saw such a focused use of graphic design in a Canadian record marketing program. With little known about this company, we must speculate a little how this might have come about.
Unable to compete with large American labels that dominated the Canadian market, Solitaire turned its attention to producing a niche product, the budget record. Solitaire's recordings generally featured classical, jazz and popular tunes, performed mainly by low- cost, relatively unknown musicians and were manufactured using cheaper 10" (33rpm) recording technology which, by the mid 50s, was almost obsolete as the industry embraced the 12" LP format with its longer playing time.
The involvement of graphic artists was clearly seen by the management as critical in the marketing of these otherwise middle-of-the-road recordings.
In keeping with the company's agenda of producing budget records, artists may well have been happy receiving small fees in exchange for the publicity which the recordings provided.
But by the early 60s, with the widespread acceptance of the 12" LP and increasing popularity of photographic covers instead of original artwork, Solitaire's brief experiment with original Canadian graphic design was over.
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Conservateur/ curator: Allan Collier
Graphiste/ graphic designer (1960): Theo Dimson
Traduction/ translation : Benoît Clairoux
Graphiste/ graphic designer (2015) : Justin Aitcheson
Directeur/ director : John Martins-Manteiga
DOMO2015