I'm sure you know the names of Salvador Dalí, Richard Gere, Michael Douglas, Jimi Hendrix, Ernst Fuchs, JFK, Brigitte Bardot, Leonard Bernstein y Andy Warhol.
And it is that, in one way or another, these names are all related to Mati Klarwein, a man who was once, in Warhol's words, "the world's most famous unknown painter."
Mati Klarwein was a painter of detailed fantastical images, termed psychedelic in his day, which found a place on the covers of music albums by The Chambers Brothers, Earth, Wind & Fire and others.
He was largely unknown because he chose to work on album covers rather than pursue a career as a painter, and although he produced over 50 covers methodologies, the most famous for Miles Davis y Santana, until recently he was a kind of phantom figure.
It is only in the last ten years that his work has begun to be appreciated, largely because it has begun to be shown in the kind of galleries that were not available to him in the 1970s and 1980s.
Klarwein died in 2002, and while he didn't live to feel the critical acclaim he's received since, his legacy is redefined on an almost weekly basis.
Fusing the sacred and the profane, Klarwein has become famous over the years for a style that today seems prescient. The themes of his work celebrate a kind of utopian multiculturalism more in tune with 2019 than the decade in which he lived.
When Klarwein began producing his photorealistic and Afrocentric work for artists such as The Last Poets y Jimi Hendrix, the world was beginning to see the rise of progressive rock.
Strong on symbolism and unafraid to state the obvious, Klarwein's bohemian edge was perhaps best suited to the previous decade, and yet his provocative imagery was more racially inclusive than many that sold during the call Summer of love.
His own journey was essentially peripatetic. Born in Hamburg in 1932 from a Polish-Jewish architect father, member of the movement Bauhaus, and German opera singer mother, the family moved to the Palestine before to Israel in 1934 to escape the Nazis.
After his parents separated when he was 16, he moved to Paris with his mother, attended the Julian Academy and studied with Fernand Leger. Later he would move to riviera, where he met Bardot, then to NY, and finally to Majorca, where it was permanently installed.
After considering film, he focused again on his painting and began working in a medium suggested by his friend and mentor, "fantastic realist." Ernst Fuchs, who suggested that he refine his oil paintings by overlaying them with casein tempera, something he would do for the rest of his career.
having moved to New York, caused a stir with his 1964 show when he exhibited his painting Crucifixion, which so outraged a gallery visitor that they attacked Klarwein with an axe.
Success came in the early XNUMXs, when Klarwein began hanging out with musicians and was commissioned to paint record covers, some of which They have become classics.
His work, like his life, was a collage. He would mix pop culture images almost at random, like a teenager with a scrapbook, proudly displaying his allegiances while attempting to make radical political statements.
In a scrapbook, ideas often seem fluffy and hackneyed, but when used as musical envelopes, they're extraordinarily powerful.
There is a psychedelic undertone to much of his work, and nearly half a century into his expression, it would be easy to imagine that much of him perhaps worked under the influence of popular narcotics, yet he never spoke publicly about this, and his son says that it definitely wasn't.
In one of the last interviews he gave Mati Klarwein, revealed that his dreams were your greatest source of inspiration.
"There was a time when I dreamed of sex and then I dreamed of drugs," he said sadly. "Soon I'll be dreaming of light." At the end of it all, her work shows all this and more.