Brain Salad Surgery - Artwork

Artwork

The album cover features distinctive Giger monochromatic biomechanical artwork, integrating an industrial mechanism with a human skull and the new ELP logo (created by Giger). The lower part of the skull's face is covered by a circular "screen", which shows the mouth and lower face in its flesh-covered state. In the original LP release, the front cover was split in half down the centre, except for the circular screen section (which was attached to the right half). Opening the halves revealed a painting of the complete face: a human female (modelled after Giger's then-wife Li Tobler), with "alien" hair and multiple scars, including the infinity symbol and a scar from a frontal lobotomy. The two images of the woman are very similar, but the outer image (in the circle) contains what appears to be the top of a phallus below her chin, arising from the "ELP" column below (the second painting originally had the complete phallus, but this was removed at the insistence of the record company). The back cover was solid black with the album title in plain white lettering.

"The mid-'70s were full of attempts to shock the public," Emerson says of the band's choice of artist. "You'd do it on the stage, in artwork, and do it in your music; try to push the limits. We chose this artwork because it pushed album cover art to its extreme."

On later vinyl printings (and most CD releases), the front cover is a single piece, and the alternate ("face") view is used on the back cover. However, the 1993 Victory Music CD reissue packaged the album in a special Digipak with the original split cover art, which also unfolded to reveal a small poster with the lyrics and band photos from the original album inner sleeve. The 1996 Rhino edition used a lenticular cover, with the two images morphing into each other when the case moved.

Both paintings were created in pure shades of grey airbrush, to appear metallic and mechanical. However, on some releases of the album, the cover was printed with too much red, making the image (in Giger's words) "cow-shit-pile-brown".

Giger's ELP logo, using a circular enclosure of the "E" and upper portion of the "P", around a column formed by the "L" and the vertical of the "P", became a standard for the band and has been used extensively since.

The paintings for the cover are titled "Work No. 217 ELP I" and "Work No. 218 ELP II". The original acrylic-on-paper paintings were lost (or stolen) after a Giger exhibition at the National Technical Museum in Prague, which ended 31 August 2005.

Giger states in his book that Emerson, Lake & Palmer never paid the bill for his artwork for this album.

Keith Emerson has had the album's primary imagery airbrushed onto the fuel tank of his Harley Davidson motorcycle, pictured on his official page with himself and separately with Moog synthesiser inventor Robert Moog astride.