Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins

Emptiness is the composition's main event. Roughly a third of the way from the bottom sits a small white oval carrying two words in a plain typewriter-style face; the title is deliberately tiny, dwarfed by the field around it.

The eye lands first on the pale oval near the top, the only bright, high-contrast incident in a sea of flat brown, then hunts downward across the void until it finds that minuscule title. That downward search is the design's engine: the sheer scale of empty paper against two thumbnail points of black and white forces you to work for the little you are given.

The tonality reinforces the tension. The photograph inside the window is monochrome, cool and documentary, while the surrounding field is a warm, uniform brown with no texture, gradient, or ornament to rest on. Nothing decorates the surface. The result reads as concealment made into an image: the smallness of the two peering faces, the ocean of blank paper, the way you are made to look harder precisely because so much is withheld.

And that is the meaning. This is a portrait defined by what it refuses to show. The window admits only heads, so the viewer is simultaneously invited in and shut out, told plainly that there is more here and that they are not allowed to see it. A cover-up has been reframed as the artwork itself, its power coming from absence rather than display. The one glimpse it grants, two ordinary human faces looking straight back, turns the withheld nudity into something almost tender rather than sensational, matching the innocence the couple claimed for the image. The picture works because it converts censorship into composition: the more it hides, the more it makes you want to look.

The photograph behind the bag was taken by Lennon himself. He set a camera on a time delay at 34 Montagu Square in Marylebone, the London flat belonging to Ringo Starr, where he and Ono were temporarily living, and captured the two of them standing naked and facing the lens. It was one of three black-and-white prints he made for the sleeve.

Lennon explained the choice simply: he had pictured Ono naked because her work felt so pure to him that he could not think of any other way to present her, and he insisted it was not meant as a sensational idea. The title carried the same tone. The couple felt like two innocents lost in a world gone mad, and there was a more literal meaning too, because after making the recording together the two consummated their relationship.

The music matched the rawness of the image. Rather than songs, the album offered avant-garde sound collage, musique concrete, and stretches of pure noise, an experiment far from anything a Beatles record had prepared listeners for.

The nude cover dictated how the release was handled. EMI, the parent record company, flatly refused to distribute an album fronted by such a photograph. The music appeared on Apple, with Track handling the United Kingdom and, in the United States, a small label called Tetragrammaton, which picked it up after Capitol also refused and which had until then been known mostly for spoken word releases. The American album came out on 11 November 1968 as Apple T 5001, with the United Kingdom following later that month.

To get it into shops at all, Track and Tetragrammaton sold the LP inside a plain brown wrapper with a cutaway showing only the couple's faces and the title. Apple Records interns were reportedly put to work bagging the records so that everything but their heads was covered.

Even the bag did not end the trouble. On 2 January 1969, more than 30,000 copies were seized by New Jersey authorities at Newark Airport, who judged the cover pornographic and blocked their sale. That confiscation, and the fights around the release, are why it is so often called arguably the most controversial album cover in rock and roll history. According to the National Portrait Gallery, the images provoked such outrage on release that they were banned as obscene in some jurisdictions.

On release, most listeners dismissed the recording as self-indulgent noise, and the album became more famous for its cover and the controversy it created than for its music, a reputation that has only hardened: it is now remembered chiefly for the sleeve rather than the sound.

Time treated the music more kindly than its first audience did. Two Virgins went on to influence experimental rock bands including Sonic Youth, its uncompromising sound collage aging into something later artists could build on.

The photographs themselves have entered the art world. Vintage prints Lennon made for the cover have been offered at auction by Bonhams, and the National Portrait Gallery in London holds one of the three black-and-white prints in its collection, showing the work in its exhibition Exposed: The Naked Portrait, which ran from 9 January to 11 September 2016. Where the image once had to be hidden in a paper bag to reach shops, Lennon's official website now describes it as a "now-iconic cover," a measure of how far the standing of the picture has shifted from scandal to accepted portraiture.