Cover Design by Cornelius van Velsen
When the Graphic Design Museum asked me to select 8 graphical covers from my record collection I spontaneously chose for the record covers designed by Cornelius van Velsen (Hilversum 1921-2010).
During the last two years a mutual personal friend, who often visited Cornelius at his home in Hilversum, told me about him, his work, his life and, sadly, his last disease. Sometimes I spoke to Cornelius on the telephone, mostly about his favorite music, jazz. In the end I met him when his poster exposition opened in the Affichemuseum in Hoorn, November 2009. Though he never saw me before, he recognized me immediately with his sharp eye. An eye betraying why the graphic art had chosen him, maybe even before he had chosen for graphic art himself. What I saw in his eyes was the art of observing, this see-through-your-face, and the how-would-I-draw-you-look. On January 5th, 2010 our Dutch master of record covers and posters left us for good, 88 years of age.
The covers I chose for ‘my’ show-window in the Graphic Design Museum perfectly match with his famous Joy-poster that hangs in the same room at some meters distance. The Joy-poster yields as the graphic icon of the museum; this is how a poster should look.
From the fifties on, Cornelius van Velsen was an important creator of the Dutch cover design. In those days Holland functioned as a cradle for the continental European record production. In America illustrated record covers were already an important feature of the presentation of records, especially as a result of the work by Alex Steinweiss, nicknamed ‘the father of the record cover’. Holland would follow this trend, both nationally and internationally, not with American cover design but with our own Dutch creations.
Cornelius van Velsen was one of the most creative Dutch designers of them all. He illustrated hundreds of covers, mostly in that happy post-war forties/fifties style. You can almost smell the Liberation of 1945. His painting for the Jazz Box became stylish for his work. His jazz feel is illustrated in the four jazz covers I selected: playful, vivacious, colorful and original. And what is funnier than those Family Frolics? The cover for Stravinsky’s Firebird is a color play of flaming red and yellow, but look closely, with white bird paws. Note the contours of the brown people of “Swing low in hi-fi” painted in white on the brown underground (a linoleum cut?).
Cornelius van Velsen was not less famous for his posters. Catchy posters, immediately recognizable when hanging in the streets, one word should be enough, he made 170 of them. His style can be compared with the work of Abram Games in the UK.
But photography gradually ousted this graphical style from the market. It happened to Alex Steinweiss in the States, to Abram Games in the UK, and it happened also to Cornelius van Velsen in Holland. A kind of revenge came for Cornelius van Velsen during the nineties when he got the opportunity to make more than a hundred covers for compact discs with classical avant-garde music. Nice items to look for.
See the Van Velsen covers from April 26th till July 26th 2010 among many other examples of skillful design during “100 Years of Dutch Graphic Design”.
Marius Quist, April 2010.
it’s amazing where the field of graphic design has come, particularly when it comes to the resources available today.. i really respect what these early GD artists were able to accomplish with the tools available to them at the time.. they created great dynamic compositions from such simplistic elements, mostly flash shapes of color