17 Facts About Mati Klarwein

Abdul Mati Klarwein was a German painter best known for his works used on the covers of music albums.

Mati Klarwein's mother Elsa Kuhne was an opera singer and his father Joseph Klarwein was a Brick Expressionist architect and later with the Bauhaus movement.

Mati Klarwein's father was Jewish and his family fled to the British Mandate of Palestine when he was two years old, after the rise of Nazi Germany.

In Paris, Mati Klarwein studied from 1949 to 1951 with Fernand Leger, and attended the art schools Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Academie Julian.

Mati Klarwein added "Abdul" to his name in the late 1950s to express his sentiments about the hostility between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East: he felt that to understand each other better, every Jew should adopt a Muslim first name, and vice versa.

At a New York exhibition in 1961, organized by Lillaz for the unveiling of the painting Flight to Egypt Mati Klarwein met Salvador Dali for the first time, whom he called a spiritual father.

Mati Klarwein is still best known for his art of the 1960s and 1970s, with its clear links to surrealism, popular psychedelic imagery, ethnic and exotic themes, erotic, and religious art from a number of different traditions.

Mati Klarwein worked more conventionally across a variety of genres including still life, landscape, and portrait.

Andy Warhol is reported to have said that Mati Klarwein was his favourite painter.

Mati Klarwein produced comparably striking designs for the covers of two Miles Davis albums, Bitches Brew and Live-Evil.

Mati Klarwein created the cover for the 2 February 1970 Time magazine issue, showing the face of Barry Commoner, projecting a powerful image of ecology, which took the stage for the first time in the public eye.

Mati Klarwein's painting Annunciation from 1961 was seen in reproduction by the musician Carlos Santana, who subsequently used it 1970 as the cover image of his band Santana's second album Abraxas.

Mati Klarwein's painting Zonked was originally planned as the cover image for Betty Davis's self-titled album, and was later used for the Last Poets album Holy Terror in 1993.

The association of his images with these successful and widely admired musicians of the time, made Mati Klarwein's work known outside the circle of lovers of contemporary art.

Mati Klarwein made over a hundred of these "improved paintings" throughout his career.

Mati Klarwein painted many commissioned portraits, including Robert Graves, Noel Coward, Juliette Binoche, Richard Gere, Michael Douglas and Brigitte Bardot.

Mati Klarwein died of cancer on 7 March 2002, in Deia, on the Spanish island of Majorca.