John Berg, Renowned Art Director
John Berg, a longtime art director for Columbia Records who oversaw the design of iconic album covers by artists including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Chicago, and Santana, died on Sunday at the Hamptons Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in Southampton. The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Durell Godfrey, a photographer for The Star. He was 83 and a year-round resident of East Hampton since retiring in 2001.
Mr. Berg, who was responsible for more than 5,000 album covers, was recognized with four Grammy Awards and 29 Grammy nominations, as well as design awards from AIGA, the Professional Association for Design, the Art Directors Club, and the Society of Illustrators. “John Berg: Album Covers, 1961-1985” was exhibited at Guild Hall in East Hampton in 2012.
His work was characterized by innovation and exemplified by albums such as “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits,” a 1967 release that was packaged with an accompanying poster for the first time. The album’s cover was itself striking, featuring a close-up, backlit photo of Mr. Dylan in profile, hair magnificently unkempt. The poster, by the designer Milton Glaser, was also of Mr. Dylan in profile, this time a silhouette from which a psychedelic rainbow of hair sprouted like colorful mushrooms.
Mr. Dylan’s 1966 double album “Blonde on Blonde” featured a gatefold sleeve which opened to depict a three-quarter length vertical photo of the artist. “The record would fall out on the floor when you opened it up,” Mr. Berg told The Star in 2012. “That was a big selling point. Everybody wanted one, because they’d never seen that before.”
Mr. Berg “is one of those figures who for one reason or another makes you want to do your best work,” Mr. Glaser wrote in a catalogue for an exhibition of his work in Italy. “There is no one in the field that I personally find more satisfying to work for. When John likes the job, I assume I’m doing well.”
“It struck me how many millions of people he touched with his vision of music,” Andy Engel, a designer who worked for Mr. Berg in the 1970s, wrote on Facebook. “Music was everything to our generation. It helped us find our place, develop our priorities, console us. Half of that was the visuals that accompanied those sounds, and so much of that was John’s vision.”
Perhaps Mr. Berg’s best known contribution to Columbia’s extraordinary catalog is Mr. Springsteen’s 1975 album “Born to Run,” another gatefold sleeve in which the artist, with a Fender Telecaster hanging from his shoulder, leans on the late Clarence Clemons, the longtime saxophonist in his E Street Band.
It might not have happened that way, Mr. Berg told The Star. Mr. Springsteen came to his office with the photographer, Eric Meola, and a stack of contact sheets. “Bruce showed me the picture he wanted, which I always describe as ‘John Updike,’ ” he said. “He looked like an author, one of those back-cover-of-his-book pictures. I asked him to leave the stuff with me, and I would go through the contacts.”
Alone, Mr. Berg chose one from about five photographs, convinced label executives to shoulder the additional cost for a gatefold sleeve, and “then had to sell it to Bruce,” he said. “The rest is history. It’s just charming, that’s the only word I can use.”
John Hendrickson Berg was born on Jan. 12, 1932, in Brooklyn to William J. Berg and the former Jeanette Hendrickson. He grew up there, graduating from Erasmus Hall High School in the borough’s Flatbush neighborhood before attending Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in Manhattan, graduating in 1952.
Mr. Berg and Ms. Godfrey, who met on a blind date, were married on May 15, 1982. They lived on East 22nd Street in Manhattan, which is within sight of Ms. Godfrey’s childhood home in the Peter Cooper Village complex. He was 13 years older than she was.
“When he went to Cooper Union,” she said, “I was playing in the play yard at Grace Church School. He must have walked by and seen me.”
Mr. Berg had bought a house in East Hampton at around 1979, “a divorce present for himself,” Ms. Godfrey explained. They lived in Manhattan and East Hampton until Mr. Berg’s retirement.
In addition to Ms. Godfrey, he is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Kristina Berg of Manhattan. A son, Lars, died in 1984, 31 years before him to the day. A brother, William, also died before him.
Mr. Berg donated his body to Stony Brook University’s Department of Anatomical Sciences, which has had a donation program for many years. He will be cremated and a marker placed in the Orient Central Cemetery in Southold, alongside those of Ms. Godfrey’s family members. His ashes will be scattered privately.
Mr. Berg’s daughter is planning a memorial next year in Manhattan. Memorial contributions have been suggested to the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, 30 Cooper Square, New York 10003.