Nervous Breakdown by Raymond Pettibon: Album Covers - Hardcover

The definitive collection of Raymond Pettibon's album covers, uniting art and music in one powerful visual history. Featuring work for Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Iggy Pop, Lana Del Rey, and many others, this volume traces the artist's bold influence on alternative culture from the late 1970s to today.

Throughout his decades-long career, Pettibon has remained deeply engaged with the world around him — from biting political satire of American geopolitics to poetic meditations on surfing and baseball. His aesthetic and political sensibilities were forged in the Southern California punk scene of the late 1970s and 1980s, evidenced in early collaborations with the Minutemen, Sonic Youth, and Saccharine Trust. Among his most iconic works is the four-column logo design for Black Flag, alongside album artwork for Iggy Pop, Foo Fighters, Lana Del Rey, and many more.

Nervous Breakdown presents for the first time every record, CD, and cassette cover since 1978 featuring Pettibon's artwork. Published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum in Ludwigshafen, Germany, this catalogue features more than 200 works from the Stefan Thull Collection. Includes essays by Max Dax, Robert Eikmeyer, and Ulrich Loock, a 1985 Artforum essay by Kim Gordon, and a complete catalogue raisonné of Pettibon's album artwork — an essential resource for fans, scholars, and collectors of contemporary art and music history.

About the Author

Raymond Pettibon (b. 1957) is known for an influential body of work that draws on American iconography spanning literature, art history, philosophy, religion, politics, sports, and alternative youth culture. Intermixing image and text, his drawings engage the visual rhetorics of pop and commercial culture while incorporating language from mass media and classic texts. His practice connects the traditions of satire and social critique — from Hogarth and Daumier to contemporary art today.