Bob Cato; Grammy Winner for Album Cover Designs

Bob Cato, 75, who helped turn record album covers into a contemporary art form and won two Grammy awards for his designs. Cato worked with such musicians as Miles Davis, Janis Joplin, Barbra Streisand and Leonard Bernstein in his role as art director for creative services at CBS-Columbia in the 1960s.

He used the work of high-profile artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol on album covers. It was also Cato’s idea to use the work of R. Crumb, the underground illustrator, on the cover of Joplin’s album “Cheap Thrills,” which was groundbreaking in its day. Years later, Crumb wrote that he disliked the music of Joplin’s band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, when he did the album cover and turned down an offer to do a Rolling Stones cover because he liked their music even less.

Cato’s cover designs for Streisand’s “People” (1964) and “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits” (1967) won him Grammy awards from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He received the academy’s President’s Merit award in 1997.

Cato’s career spanned 50 years, beginning in 1947 at Harper’s Bazaar magazine. There he was exposed to a mixture of photography, modern art, open space and sharp typography that would help define his later work.

He taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and the Rochester Institute of Technology. His final 10 years were largely devoted to fine art, photography and producing books, including “Joyce Images” (1994).

On Friday, in New York, due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease.