Description

By 1986 Madonna was famous for lace, crucifixes and provocation. The cover of True Blue showed a different woman: platinum blonde, head tipped back, eyes closed, her profile set against a soft sky blue. The photograph was taken by Herb Ritts, who had already worked with her on the poster for Desperately Seeking Susan, and it introduced the cleaner, classic Hollywood look of her third album.

The colour was added afterwards. Ritts shot in black and white. Jeri Heiden, then in the Warner Bros. art department and credited as Jeri McManus, selected the image together with Madonna and creative director Jeff Ayeroff, then experimented with treatments to match the title, producing a hand-tinted, blue-toned version with a bleached complexion. In the United States and Canada the cover carried no name at all, a confident choice for a star who no longer needed one.

Biographer Lucy O'Brien called it a Warholian piece of pop art and "our first glimpse of Madonna as a classic icon," and J. Randy Taraborrelli read its washed-out colours as a sign of artistic growth. The inner sleeve held no photographs, only credits and lyrics, and the album, released on 30 June 1986, was dedicated to her husband Sean Penn, "the coolest guy in the universe." Billboard has ranked the cover among the greatest album artworks.

Credit

Photography by Herb Ritts; art direction and design by Jeri McManus (Heiden) and Jeffrey Kent Ayeroff