Mati Klarwein painted pictures that ended up being held in the hand. His canvases were made as easel paintings, but many of them reached their widest audience as twelve-inch record sleeves. That accident of format makes Mati Klarwein a useful case study for anyone who designs covers, posters or packaging: his work shows how far detail, symbolism and colour can be pushed before a square image stops reading as one picture.
His paintings are in copyright. The Met, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art list no Klarwein works in their open-access collections, so this guide describes the work in words and uses no images. For historic images you can study and reuse, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Mati Klarwein?
Klarwein was born in Hamburg on 9 April 1932. Rogallery’s artist biography describes his father as a Jewish architect of Polish origin and his mother as a German opera singer; the family left Nazi Germany for Palestine when he was two. Rogallery adds that his father, the architect Joseph Klarwein, went on to design the Knesset building in Jerusalem.
After the war Klarwein moved to Paris, where he studied with Fernand Léger. The Visionary Revue, an online journal of visionary art, records that Léger introduced him to Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel and surrealism, and Klarwein himself later said Léger’s main gift to him was that introduction rather than any direct influence. Books of his work were published under the name Abdul Mati Klarwein, the form that appears on the covers of his 1970s monographs.
He spent long periods in New York and travelled widely, and in later life lived in Deià, the village on Mallorca’s north-west coast. Rogallery and the Visionary Revue give his death as 7 March 2002 at his home there; the catalogue of Es Baluard, the museum of modern and contemporary art in Palma, gives the year as 2003.
What to look at in a Mati Klarwein painting
Klarwein worked in several genres, from portraits to landscapes, but the visionary paintings designers study share four habits.
Everything at once. His large compositions combine figures, deities, animals, landscapes and pop-culture faces in a single field. Rather than one focal point with supporting background, there are many small scenes, each finished to the same pitch.
High-key, saturated colour. Skies, skin and foliage are pushed to intense hues with crisp edges between them. The image still reads from across a room or shrunk to a streaming thumbnail, even though the detail only appears up close.
Smooth, polished surfaces. There are almost no visible brushstrokes. The finish is closer to an old-master panel or an airbrushed illustration than to gestural painting, which gives impossible scenes a matter-of-fact clarity.
Symbols from many traditions. Religious imagery from several faiths sits alongside surrealist motifs and contemporary celebrities. The mix is deliberate: it turns each painting into a kind of encyclopedia that viewers decode at their own pace.
Key works and record covers
Annunciation (1961) and Santana’s Abraxas (1970). Klarwein described Annunciation as the first painting he made after his first visit to New York in 1961. Carlos Santana saw a reproduction of it and chose it for the cover of his band’s second album, Abraxas, released by Columbia in September 1970; the sleeve credits the art simply to “MATI”. The painting stages its annunciation scene, with a winged figure and a woman, inside a dense, dreamlike landscape, and its saturated colour holds the square together.
Bitches Brew (1970). For Miles Davis’s double album, Klarwein painted a single image that wraps across the front and back of the gatefold sleeve. Published accounts of the commission say Davis asked him to listen to the recordings first and paint in response. The result pairs sea, sky, storm clouds and figures across the fold, so the sleeve works as one continuous landscape when opened flat.
Live-Evil (1971). The follow-up Davis cover splits the concept between front and back. Klarwein recalled that he was already painting a pregnant woman for one side when Davis telephoned asking for “a picture of life on one side and evil on the other”; the reverse became the darker half of the pair.
Time magazine, 2 February 1970. Klarwein painted the cover portrait of the biologist and environmental campaigner Barry Commoner for Time’s issue on ecology. The National Portrait Gallery in Washington holds the original, catalogued as acrylic on board, 1970, a gift of Time magazine, under the name Mathias Klarwein.
Jon Hassell, Dream Theory in Malaya (1981). The trumpeter Jon Hassell’s official website credits the cover of this album to Klarwein’s painting Alexander’s Dream. By then Klarwein had turned to calmer, interior-like scenes that he called “inscapes”, and the cover shows how his imagery could slow down to suit ambient music.
He also published his own picture books: Milk n’ Honey (Harmony Books, 1973), a large-format square collection of his paintings, and God Jokes (Harmony Books, 1976).
The Aleph Sanctuary
Klarwein’s most ambitious project was not a cover but a room. The Visionary Revue describes the Aleph Sanctuary as an enclosed, transportable space about three metres on each side, its interior lined with his paintings, which he imagined as a chapel for all religions. The Visionary Revue records that he was later forced, for financial reasons, to dismantle the sanctuary and sell the paintings individually. For designers it prefigures the immersive installation: panels that work alone and as a sequence around the viewer.
Technique: layered oil and tempera
The glow of Klarwein’s colour comes from method as much as palette. Descriptions of Annunciation, such as the one on the blog Somethin’ of Nothin’, call it a “mische technique”: layers of oil and tempera on primed canvas. This mixed technique, or Mischtechnik, builds a painting in thin alternating layers, with quick-drying egg tempera used for crisp drawing and highlights and translucent oil glazes laid over it for depth. It is the method associated with the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. The Visionary Revue records that Klarwein spent the summer of 1962 in Deià with two of that school’s painters, Ernst Fuchs and Arik Brauer; see our guide to Ernst Fuchs for the technique at its most elaborate.
The surrealist debt is just as clear. Klarwein’s smooth finish, deep perspective and dream logic owe much to the painter he met through Léger’s classroom; compare our guide to Salvador Dalí, whose precise rendering of impossible scenes set the model.
Later in life Klarwein took up a playful side practice. Rogallery and the Visionary Revue both describe his “improved paintings”: unwanted canvases bought cheaply at flea markets and thrift shops, which he reworked by painting new elements into them.
How designers can borrow from Mati Klarwein
- Design the whole package. Bitches Brew and Live-Evil treat front and back as one composition. On a gatefold, a box, a book jacket or a carousel, plan the image so it reads both as separate faces and as a continuous spread.
- Layer detail under a strong colour silhouette. Make sure the image works as a few big colour masses at small size, then add detail that only appears up close. Squint at your design or shrink it to a thumbnail to test the big shapes first, the same check our poster design principles guide recommends.
- Build palettes with high saturation and clear edges. Klarwein’s colour works because neighbouring hues stay distinct. When building a vivid scheme, keep value contrast between adjacent colours so the image does not turn muddy. Our vintage colour palettes guide and the colour palette generator can help you test combinations.
- Match the image to the sound. Davis reportedly asked Klarwein to listen before painting. Brief illustrators with the actual product, recording or text, not just a mood board.
- Remix with care. His improved paintings reworked old canvases he owned. In digital work, start from material that is genuinely public domain or licensed, never from someone else’s in-copyright art.
Klarwein’s covers and paintings are for study, not reuse. Record sleeves also carry band names and label marks, which remain the property of their owners. When you need imagery you can publish, start with museum-flagged public-domain material.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Mati Klarwein?
Mati Klarwein was a painter born in Hamburg in 1932 whose family left Germany for Palestine when he was two. He studied with Fernand Léger in Paris, later lived in Deià on Mallorca, and died there in 2002. He is known above all for paintings used as album covers.
Which album covers did Mati Klarwein paint?
His paintings appear on Santana’s Abraxas (1970), which used his 1961 painting Annunciation, and on Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew (1970) and Live-Evil (1971). He also supplied covers for Jon Hassell, including Dream Theory in Malaya (1981).
What technique did Mati Klarwein use?
His visionary paintings are described as built in a mixed technique, layering oil and tempera on primed canvas. The method gives his colour its glow and his surfaces their smooth, detailed finish.
Is Mati Klarwein’s art in the public domain?
No. He died in 2002 and his paintings remain in copyright. The Met, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art list no Klarwein works in their open-access data, so study his covers rather than reusing them.
