Description

The cover of Abraxas, released by Columbia on 23 September 1970, was not made for the album. It is Annunciation, a painting from 1961 by the German-French artist Mati Klarwein, one of the first works he made after moving to New York. Carlos Santana reportedly saw it in a magazine and asked for it to be the cover of the band's next record.

Klarwein's painting reworks the Christian scene of the Annunciation in his own psychedelic language: a winged red angel, a Black Madonna, flowers and dense patterned detail fill the frame, with the band's name and title worked into the image rather than laid on top of it. That mix of sacred imagery, African and Latin elements and sheer colour mirrored a band that fused rock with Latin percussion, blues and jazz. On the back of the sleeve the art is credited simply to "MATI".

The same year, Klarwein painted the cover of Miles Davis's Bitches Brew, and the two sleeves made him one of the defining visual artists of the period. Abraxas is now regarded as a classic of rock album art, and it introduced a generation of listeners to a painter they would never have found in a gallery.

Credit

Cover artwork by Mati Klarwein, based on his painting Annunciation.