Photo: Courtesy of Eisen Bernardo via Instagram.
For Eisen Bernardo, album art is the peanut butter to art history’s jelly. In a series of digital collages that are gaining traction on Instagram, the Philippines-based graphic artist places various album covers by performers such as David Bowie, Whitney Houston, and Lana del Rey atop paintings by Pablo Picasso, John Singer Sargent, and others.
Granted, similar mashups have been done before. Christian Marclay, for instance, is known for producing human figures assembled from various record covers.
But Bernardo’s works comprise a universe of their own, where recognizable musicians find themselves placed into the art historical canon in curious ways.
1. Here, we find a young Whitney Houston taking a leisurely stroll with her canine companions in Gaston Casimir Saint-Pierre‘s Diana the Huntress, a portrait that depicts the Greek goddess of the hunt.
2. Lana del Rey, who stands poised in Frederick Morgan‘s The Proposal, seems as unsympathetic to her behatted suitor as was the original model from the late 1800s.
3. If Benjamin West sought to capture a sense of debonair, the Anglo-American painter might find that Justin Bieber serves as an adequate substitute for his portrait of English judge John Neardley Wilmot.
4. Pablo Picasso would paint the second iteration of his Seated Harlequin in 1923. Little did he know that the model he was truly awaiting was one Childish Gambino.
5. Historians have struggled to name the figure in Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller‘s 1839 Portrait of an Unidentified Seated Girl in a White Satin Dress, but in this version, the woman in question is none other than singer FKA Twigs.
6. While a lounging Katy Perry reclines over in the distance, a young maiden collects a basket of flowers in John William Waterhouse‘s 1910 Spring Spreads One Green Lap of Flowers.
7. In what’s certain to be a tragedy corrected, premiere American portrait artist John Singer Sargent finally finds his golden opportunity to see a young Michael Jackson in one of his 1906 paintings, thanks to this re-imagining of 1st Earl Roberts.
8. An affinity for music isn’t the only thing Léon Maître and John Legend share, now that this 1886 Portrait of Léon Maître by Henri Fantin-Latour has been given the album art treatment.
9. Of course, a roundup wouldn’t be complete without a particular pop star’s presence. And, as we expected, her portrait in Albert Joseph Moore‘s 1886 painting Silver, is sufficient evidence that Beyoncé would be fierce in any era.