Thirteen Fine Artists Every Metalhead Should Know
Good art makes music sound better. Yes, a band should be able to play without any sort of backdrop or stage gear and still rock, but there’s something awesome when music is surrounded by kickass imagery (some more so than others).
And for metal, there’s no better art than classic or hight art. The best metal album covers are either public domain works by mentally-unhinged artists whose whole lives were spent depicting religious insanity, modern-day artists depicting awesome metal imagery in grandiose ways, or minimalist reimaginings of the music’s incredible impact. Metal works well alongside dramatic art with a lot of earnestness put in it, or at the very least comic book-style art that goes entirely off the hinges in its horrific depictions of madness and evil.
So whether you’re a metalhead artist looking for inspiration, a band looking for something evil to use on your album sleeve, or just a typical headbanger who likes to look at rad shit, here are thirteen artists you should probably know pretty well.
Gustave Doré
You know Gustave Dore’s work, if not from Emperor album art than from just seeing it around. His illustrations of Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost are some of the most strikingly metal pieces of art in existence. No one has ever done the adventure of darkness as well as he did.
Francis Bacon
Bacon is the David Cronenberg of modern art. A tormented figure with haunted eyes whose work translated the horrors of WWII, he is best known for his depictions of inside-out bodies, sexual flesh animals, and screaming popes. His sense of sprawling body horror touches on a primal respect for carnality and order found in the soul of death metal.
Hans Bellmer
No artist has produced work as terrifying as German painter, illustrator, and sculptor Hans Bellmer. Above all, Bellmer is known for his sexualized giant dolls of tragic-faced prepubescent girls in severe states of decay and deformity. The above cancerous monstrosity is actually one of his least disturbing creations. Think Lord Mantis.
Hieronymous Bosch
Rarely do ‘small’ and ‘metal’ go well together, but Bosch made it work. The medieval Dutch artist, best known for the triptych above, showcased the chaos of the human and divine by illustrating the many tiny creatures, events, and behaviors that all add up to the universe. His depictions of Hell, featured on Celtic Frost’s Into The Pandemonium, took our understanding of evil away from horns and fangs and towards knife-birds and nun-pigs.
Remedios Varo
Part of the Surrealist movement in Paris, Spanish painter Remedios Varo knew something about magic. Her paintings portray the mind-bending spirit behind the occult arts, and as such make them sympathetic and interesting. In Varo’s work, the sorcerer is not an ancient crone bent over a bubbling cauldron, but the desire to discover and control that exists in us all.
Otto Dix
The art of German painter and printmaker Otto Dix coming out of World War I, and it’s absolutely chilling. Dix was unconcerned with portraying the political or heroic face of war; instead, he focused on the horrific and disgusting realities discovered in the trenches. The result is a body of work that would make even the most hardened black metal kvltist gape. Total Slayer.
Albrecht Dürer
Like that of Dore, the work German artist Albrecht Dürer can be found everywhere throughout metal. His stark woodcuts of Death, the Devil, and the Apocalypse display some of the earliest concepts of the storybook insanity at the core of the Bible.
Takato Yamamoto
The second-youngest artist on this list (born 1960), Yamamoto is a true modern visionary. His work has all the lofty atmosphere and surreal vision of the greats. His use of unsettling eroticism, angelic vampires, and pop culture imagery has a firm grasp on the modern of carnage. There’s a real creepiness here.
Zdzislaw Beksiński
The Polish painter Zdzislaw Beksiński gave us a post-apocalypse like none we’ve ever seen. Though the structures in his gritty and bombed-out world seem man-made, and though the creatures surrounding them are humanoid, everything and everyone is so broken-down or mutated that one wonders if there is even a memory of civilization left therein.
Francisco Goya
Considered last of the Old Masters, Goya was revered for his romantic paintings. But it was his Black Paintings, which depicted scabby witches praying to talking goats and gods devouring their children raw, that remain his most revered legacy. His bizarre and pastoral illustrations of black magic make the dark arts tangible, an activity that we can all take part in if we’re only ready to kiss the fucking goat.
Alfred Kubin
Like many of his countrymen, German painter Alfred Kubin took surrealism to dark, fantastical places. His depictions of real-life horrors like Drought as twisted demons emerging from the woods adds a strange childishness to his haunting images. In that way, his paintings and sketches have a disenfranchised fairy tale quality to them that makes them perfect for melodic black metal and noise respectively.
Max Ernst
In many ways, Max Ernst’s art defines the surrealist movement. His paintings and collages, specifically those of Un demain de bonté merge biological imagery with societally-created structures, all coming together in nightmarish hybrids of jarring concepts that somehow make perfect sense together. It’s like a Sigh album being squeezed out onto canvas.
Harry Clarke
Harry Clarke’s illustrations breathed new life into old classics. His stark and busy renditions of stories by Poe, Coleridge, and Hans Christian Andersen showed all the dark witchcraft and sensual undertones that we often forget are present in those well-worn tales. While his work in stained glass is also well-regarded, it’ll always be his black-and-white book illustrations that remain burned into the viewer’s head.
BONUS MODERN ARTIST: Alessandro Sicioldr
Though Sicioldr is the youngest artist on this list–he’s probably the only artist mentioned here who you can follow on Instagram–his work seems to speak of an old soul. His art emanates a surreal darkness that can be interpreted in many ways; as such, it’s not only his paintings, but also what lies behind them, that strikes the viewer.
