blog_Clémence Villaines_A still life and a rock album: the meeting

In the 80s, rock was not going well. On May 2, 1983, the British rock band New Order released its second studio album: Power, Corruption and Lies. The band has the reputation of giving few interviews, giving the image of a band not particularly playing the promotional media card. The group is renowned for its radical style of questioning our consumption and communication modes. Good for them, and you will understand why, the cover of the album is made by Peter Saville — like most of the bands of the label Factory Records, which New Order belongs.

Born in Manchester in 1955, Peter Saville is an English art director and graphic designer. He started as a graphic designer for the Factory Records. The label, founded in 1978 by Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus, is characterized by the minimalist aesthetic of Peter Saville. He is one of the first to think the album cover as an object which does not necessarily require the presence of the name of the group and the name of the album. This altered vision of the consuming and communicating ways joins what the group New Order thinking, for whom the cover is realized. As I said before, good for them! Peter Saville became famous for his record sleeves innovative design, which became emblematic.

Peter Saville makes the link between underground culture — such as rock music — and mainstream culture, a culture more reserved for the elite, which at first seems to have nothing in common. The Power, Corruption and Lies cover is the most obvious example. Peter Saville, finding the title of the album ‘machiavellian’, wanted to work on a historical archive image and turn it into something modern. Wishing to be inspired by a dark Renaissance painting, he went to the National Gallery. It was by looking at postcards brought back from the museum that he got interested in a painting by Henri Fantin-Latour, A Basket of Roses, thanks to the advice of his companion Martha Ladly. The use of the 1890 painting for the cover was made possible thanks to the exceptional permission of the National Gallery’s Director. We find on the front cover a reproduction of Henri Fantin-Latour's painting, A Basket of Roses, on which colored squares have been added. The reverse side reveals the key that allows us to decipher the mysterious color code seen on the front. It takes the shape of a colored ‘rosace’ that corresponds each color to a letter, allowing the text to be deciphered. In 2011, Peter Saville explained to The Guardian that flowers are seductive and suggest ways in which power, corruption and lies creep into our lives. In the cover of Power, Corruption and Lies, Peter Saville brings together the classicism of Henri Fantin-Latour's painting and the modernity of the colorful typographic alphabet he created. The author combines an industrial representation of a color chart with a classic canvas.

This fusion of eras and styles may seem surprising. Rock, beyond being a musical genre, can be defined as an attitude, a lifestyle easily identifiable and perpetually renewed. Rock is both artistic and politically engaged, with a desire for freedom, for a separation from the system… When we look at Henri Fantin-Latour, the painter of the painting used by Peter Saville for the album Power, Corruption and Lies, his way of thinking and acting is not so far from the rock fans, quite the contrary. Henri Fantin-Latour, painter of the XIXth century, likes to go against academic principles. In the hierarchy of genres, established by the Académie des Beaux-arts at that time, the still life of fruit or flowers is relegated to the bottom of the list. His still lifes amaze the impressionists. This idea of taking against established principles can join rock ideologies.

The modernity and the questions raised in the musical approach and the visual of the cover propels both the group and the graphic designer. Power, Corruption and Lies album is almost as famous for its cover as for its music, it is one of the most innovative albums of its time. As Peter Saville said, ‘design is able to cross the consciousness of a new generation through popular music. Music inspires a more direct, passionate and physical response’.