A look at the artist who fused sound, sex, spirit, and style across decades of iconic album art. 

Few album cover artists reward gobbling LSD more than Mati Klarwein. His remarkably precise paintings of mystical visions, which were commissioned for two-dimensional LP covers, will transform into heaving, breathing journeys after a few drops of acid. The sleeves reject the notion of branding. They feel like sacred texts. Klarwein painted like someone decoding a message pressed into the grooves: Look long enough and something inside them starts to pulse. His covers were charged, ritualistic, bursting with spirits both sacred and profane.

Born in Hamburg in 1932, Klarwein fled Nazi Germany with his family and later studied painting in Paris under Fernand Léger. A traveler by nature, he explored India, Haiti, Morocco, Bali, Spain with glee, along the way collecting symbols, colors, spiritual experiences, energies. His paintings carried it all: tantric dream logic, Islamic patterns, Afro-Caribbean vibes, Catholic allusions, erotic celebrations.

“We used to share the same tailor,” Klarwein once said of Jimi Hendrix. They used to hang out together in New York. “We would spend afternoons dropping acid and trying out new sets of clothes together.” The artist added that he was working on a cover “for an album that was never finished, where Jimi and Gil Evans were collaborating. Unfortunately Jimi died during the recordings and it was never released.”

“He would listen to it constantly,” Klarwein’s son Balthazar told GQ in 2019, of his dad’s listening habits, “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.”

He added, “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.”

It shows. Bitches Brew is less an album cover than a visual field recording: faces, flame, water, birth. Santana’s Abraxas reimagines Catholic annunciation with Santería heat. The Last Poets’ This Is Madness radiates fire and riot. Even Laid Back grants Gregg Allman a kind of haloed hush.

Less known, and very covetable, is Klarwein’s Milk ’n’ Honey. Published in 1973 as a 12-inch art book, it was meant to be paired with a record narrated by Timothy Leary. The album never came. (Acid does that.) The book remains erotic, devotional, comic, possessed.

“He absorbed everything around him,” said his son. “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.”

Though most of his best-known covers came in the ’70s, Klarwein continued to paint for records well into the 1980s and ’90s. His work appears on albums by Jon Hassell, including Aka-Darbari-Java: Magic Realism (1983), as well as on projects by Bill Laswell, Yusef Lateef, and others. He also created artwork for the jazz label CMP, contributing to releases by artists like Jack DeJohnette and Nana Vasconcelos, where his surreal and symbolic visual language still thrived.

Klarwein died in 2002 in Mallorca, Spain, where he had lived and worked for many years. His legacy remains not just in galleries, but in crates, on turntables, in the spaces where music and vision still meet.