This is Roy Kuhlman, the American graphic designer born in 1932 who sadly departed for the big studio in the sky in 2007.
He started out as a painter but was unable to make a living, so he looked for an alternative to using his abstract ideas, and this brought him to the world of graphics. He became best known to the design community via his cover designs for US publisher Grove Press, which started as a simple freelance relationship in 1952 and spanned almost two decades. Kuhlman was reportedly paid $50 per cover design and, due to financial constraints, was often limited to only two colour lines. But that didn’t stop Kuhlman from creating a very recognisable personality for the publishing house and for himself. He had a minimal graphic vocabulary, avoiding literal representation, as he always maintained that he could not draw well.
Outside of Grove Press, he worked for a range of clients, from advertising agency Sudler & Hennessey to Columbia Records and Benton & Bowles. At the latter, he worked on the IBM campaign Mathematics Serving Man, for which he won the AIGA Best Ads of the Year Award in 1960. He worked until his retirement in the 1980s but continued to make his own photographic experiments. In 1995, he was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame. In his final years, he was taken by the horrors of dementia.
The above beautiful cover for Evergreen magazine by Roy from 1965 must have surely been an influence for Annie Leibovitz when photographing John Lennon's nude embrace of Yoko Ono taken in 1980.
For me, his graphic approach links with that of two British graphic designers, Keith Cunningham and John Sewell, their work has a very similar feel. Take a look. Keith Cunningham John Sewell