As through-lines go, this is one of the best, if one of the most random: Salvador Dalí, Richard Gere, Michael Douglas, Jimi Hendrix, Ernst Fuchs, JFK, Brigitte Bardot, Leonard Bernstein and Andy Warhol. In some way or other, these boldface names are all related to Mati Klarwein, a man who once was, in Warhol’s words, “The most famous unknown painter in the world.”

He was largely unknown because he chose to work on album covers rather than pursue a painting career, and while he produced more than 50 ground-breaking covers – most famously for Miles Davis and Santana – he was until recently something of a ghost-like figure. It is only in the last ten years or so that his work has started to be appreciated, largely because it has started to be shown in the kind of galleries that weren’t available to him in the Seventies and Eighties. Klarwein died in 2002 and while he didn’t live to feel the critical acclaim that has since come his way, his legacy is being redefined on an almost weekly basis.

‘Artist And Model’ (1959)

Fusing sacred and profane, Klarwein has become renowned over the years for a style that today looks prescient. The themes in his work celebrate a kind of utopian multiculturalism more in tune with 2019 than the Seventies. By the time Klarwein started producing his photorealistic, Afrocentric work for the likes of The Last Poets, Miles Davis, Santana, Jimi Hendrix and Earth, Wind & Fire, the hippie tropes of the Sixties had morphed into the heads-down-see-you-at-end, double-denim world of progressive, largely white rock. Heavy on the symbolism and unafraid to state the obvious, Klarwein’s bohemian edge was perhaps more suited to the previous decade, and yet his provocative images were more racially inclusive than a lot of those peddled during the so-called Summer Of Love.

His own journey was quintessentially peripatetic. Born in Hamburg in 1932 to a Polish-Jewish architect father, who was a member of the Bauhaus movement, and a German opera singer mother, the family moved to pre-Israel Palestine in 1934 to escape the Nazis. After his parents separated when he was 16, he moved to Paris with his mother, attending the Académie Julian and studying with Fernand Leger. He would later move to the Riviera (where he hung with Bardot), then New York and finally Majorca, where he settled.

‘Drugs were part of [Klarwein’s] reality. But he didn’t need psychedelics to paint the psychedelic way’

“I grew up in three cultures,” he once said. “Jewish, Islamic and Christian. These circumstances and my family’s stern resistance against being part of any kind of orthodoxy has made me the outsider I always have been.” In the Fifties, he added “Abdul” to his name (it means “servant” in Arabic), to express his sentiments about the increasing hostility between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East. He often said that every Jew should adopt a Muslim name, and vice versa, to better understand each other.

After considering film, he focused again on his painting and started working in a medium suggested by his friend and mentor, the “phantastic realist” Ernst Fuchs, who suggested he refine his oil paintings by layering them with casein tempera (a kind of mischtechnik), something he would do for the rest of his career. Having moved to New York, he caused a commotion with his 1964 show when he exhibited his “blasphemous” painting “Crucifixion”, which so incensed one visitor to the gallery that they attacked Klarwein with an axe.

‘Annunciation’ (1961) was used as the cover of the Santana album Abraxas

Success came in the early Seventies, when Klarwein started hanging out with musicians and was commissioned to paint album covers, some of which have now become classics. A surprising by-product of the digitisation of music has been a complete re-evaluation of the album sleeve. Whereas they were once treated as low-caste, mass-market commodities, album covers now have almost no bearing on whether or not anyone buys it and, having become almost incidental in the marketing and brand building of artists, so they have started to take on greater importance. Well, old ones, that is; these days their design is completely subservient to the artist’s Spotify or Instagram messaging. For sure, covers such as Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Dark Side Of The Moon, Rumours or (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? were considered ironic on release and hundreds more are now considered to be historical cultural documents, which is why Mati Klarwein’s stock is rising.

Klarwein’s elder son, Balthazar, himself a keen filmmaker, is a loving custodian of that legacy. Unsurprisingly, it was music that fired his father’s imagination, music that got him up in the morning. “He would listen to it constantly,” Balthazar says, “in the studio, the kitchen, in his car. Music was very much part of the family environment. It was African music, Spanish flamenco, classical, Afrobeat, jazz, sometimes maybe some rap or hip hop or drum and bass. People would send him cassettes from all over the world and he would play them religiously. In his studio up in the mountains there is a small music library, almost an entire record store. His big love was Afro-Cuban music and I guess it’s that fusing of different cultures that made him so particular.”

Bitches Brew by Miles Davis (1970), also designed by Klarwein © EyeBrowz / Alamy Stock Photo

It was the same in his pictures, which took the basic surrealist model of almost banal juxtaposition and extrapolated it using powerful, pop-cultural themes. He was particularly fond of using the black female form emerging from sci-fi Mediterranean “moonscapes”. This style was particularly prominent when he was working for Santana or Miles Davis and can be seen in the covers of Abraxas (by the former) and Bitches Brew and Live-Evil (by the latter; there would have been a further Klarwein-designed Davis album, but when Davis suspected his wife, Betty, who was singing on the album, of having an affair with Jimi Hendrix, an allegation she denied, he promptly cancelled it). Similar themes were evoked in his private work, although they tended to be used in a more temperate way. He would also bristle when critics called him a surrealist and while Klarwein was close enough to Dalí to talk about “acting as each other’s pimps and cultural spies”, he hated the association, not wanting to appear to be clutching his friend’s coat-tails.

Jimi Hendrix was convinced Klarwein’s ‘Aleph Sanctuary’ was a kind of 3-D psychometric portrait of him, a picture of his own possibilities

“He travelled so much when we were young and you can see this in his work,” says Balthazar. “He absorbed everything around him. In a sense, he was a harbinger of change, because he hated the homogenised world and wanted to celebrate different cultural identities, especially through the rituals of music. Every year he would disappear somewhere new.”

His work, like his life, was a collage. He would mix pop-cultural images together almost randomly, like a teenager with a scrapbook, proudly showing his allegiances while attempting to make sweeping political statements. In a scrapbook, the ideas often look callow and trite, but used in the medium of music wraparounds they are extraordinary powerful. One of his keynote works is a huge circular painting called “Grain Of Sand”, (itself a reference to the William Blake poem “Auguries Of Innocence”), painted between 1963 and 1965, a complex mandala of bodies, melting minds, aliens and flowers, with cameos by Ray Charles, Picasso, Roland Kirk, Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe, Socrates and “a Milky Way of playmates”. “I wanted to paint a picture you could hang on a wall any which way, a rotating universe with no ups or downs,” he said at the time. “It was 1962 and I had a special crush on Marilyn.

‘Jimi Hendrix’ (1970)

Over the years, this piece has slowly developed grudging critical acclaim and is now looked upon as a perfect encapsulation of the Swinging Sixties, a picture postcard of a decade of fleeting, bruised iconography.

“It’s quite a literal painting,” says Balthazar. “[My father] was by no means a conceptualist, although there’s always a concept and idea behind his paintings and this one is universal. It’s a universal theme. He was obviously influenced by Hieronymus Bosch and, of course, Ernst Fuchs, although he was influenced by his surroundings and music as much as he was by other artists.”

Mati Klarwein’s astonishing ‘collage’ images appeared on more than 50 album covers, including Abraxas by Santana (1970) © EyeBrowz / Alamy Stock Photo

There is a psychedelic tinge to much of his work and from the distance of nearly half a century, it would be easy to imagine that a lot of it was perhaps attempted while under the influence of popular narcotics. He never talked publicly about this, however, and his son says this was definitely not the case.

“He never painted on drugs,” says Balthazar, “but he tried everything. Drugs weren’t a taboo in the family. It was just part of this reality. But nothing in excess. I think he embraced them, but also had respect for it. But a lot of his paintings, which I thought were from a later period and that look completely inspired by an acid trip, were done much before he ever even tried acid. Timothy Leary said that [my father] didn’t need psychedelics to paint the psychedelic way, but Tim did introduce him to acid and they were friends.”

‘I grew up in Jewish, Islamic and Christian cultures. It made me an outsider’

Klarwein spent his life surrounded by bohemians, not least Dalí, who was his friend as well as another mentor. They met in Paris in the Sixties, bouncing around the cafés and galleries of Saint-Germain-Des-Prés. “One night, he had been invited to Dalí’s studio,” says Balthazar. “They had been out for dinner and Dalí said, ‘Come by tomorrow to my studio.’ So the next day my father turned up at the studio. The door was open and as he walked in he found Dalí sitting behind his easel, masturbating in front of his model, who had her back turned, so she had no idea what was going on.”

‘Crucifixion’ (1963-1965)

A few years later, in New York, Jimi Hendrix became a huge fan of Klarwein’s work. His favourite was a huge, immersive “chapel” called “Aleph Sanctuary”, which was a portable, three-metre-cubed temple made out of various metals and wood and panelled with 68 original paintings of various sizes, magical, mystical paintings that represented a variety of Biblical passages. It was built in Klarwein’s Union Square studio between 1963 and 1970 and when it was finished Hendrix would sit cross-legged right in the middle, staring at all the paintings around him. In his LSD haze he was convinced that this 3-D extravaganza was a kind of psychometric portrait of him, an explosion of thought and theme, an interpretation of his own work and desires, a picture of his own possibilities. There is a photograph of Klarwein sitting with Hendrix in New York in 1970, in which the painter definitely looks like the dominant partner. If you look at Klarwein’s history and study the narrative arc of his career you might think he was just a dope-smoking hippie who was lucky enough to sell some of his work to some drug-addled rock stars. But in photographs Klarwein always looks like a rock star himself, with strong features and leonine hair, dressed head to toe in crushed velvet and coming across as some kind of louche international playboy, which in a way he was.

Perhaps his closest collaborator was Miles Davis, whom he met through Hendrix’s girlfriend. Davis would visit Klarwein at his home in Majorca and they would sit and plot. Klarwein’s motto was “A bit of everything can be very good for you but a lot of one thing can kill you.” It’s not known how Davis felt about this, although staying in Klarwein’s house he would have had a smorgasbord of distractions: the painter grew magic mushrooms and there were always stashes of weed in the freezer.

‘In his studio up in the mountains there is a music library, almost an entire record store’

For Klarwein, the excesses of the late Sixties and early Seventies were easy to compartmentalise and by the Eighties he had foresworn most of his indulgent behaviour, painting for eight or nine hours a day, fuelled by little but caffeine. He started painting portraits too, of the likes of Robert Graves, Noël Coward, Juliette Binoche, Richard Gere, Michael Douglas and, remarkably, JFK (believed to have been commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy after her husband’s assassination). When he painted the French photographer Bettina Rheims, he was paid with a white Mercedes.

‘Julie Awake’ (1974)

His son’s favourite paintings are not the most famous and while the images used for Bitches Brew and Abraxas are now classics of the genre, Balthazar is fonder of the recycled art his father started producing towards the end of his life. He called them “improved paintings”. He’d buy old, unloved pieces and paint over them, “according to my own desire”, slowly building his own figurative images on top of the originals, suggesting the kind of meta work that would one day be a staple of everyone from Richard Prince to the person you saw last night on Instagram. Klarwein’s work was always based on collage, on montage, always fuelled by surreal juxtapositions and a sense of play. “I like to paint paintings that I haven’t seen,” he used to say. His strongest work, the work we now revere, will always remain those paintings he did for Miles Davis and Santana back when looking at the cover art of an album was as integral to the experience as listening to the music itself.

In one of the last interviews Klarwein gave, he revealed that his dreams were his most important source of inspiration. “There was a time when I dreamed of sex and then I dreamed of drugs,” he said, ruefully. “Soon I will be dreaming of light.”

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