Belgian pop artist Guy Peellaert dies at 74
Last Updated: Thursday, November 20, 2008 | 2:22 PM ET
CBC News
The less-controversial version of the cover for David Bowie's Diamond Dogs with art created by Guy Pellaert. Belgian pop artist Guy Peellaert, whose work includes album covers for the Rolling Stones and David Bowie, has died according to a report from Agence France Press.
Peellaert died Monday in Paris of heart failure. He was 74.
Peellaert created dozens of album covers, including David Bowie's Diamond Dogs, with its image of a male dog with Bowie's face and the Rolling Stones' It's Only Rock 'n' Roll. The Diamond Dogs cover, controversial because it showed the dog's genitalia, is considered a collectors' item because later versions were airbrushed over.
He designed posters for countless films, such as Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Robert Altman's Short Cuts and Wim Wender's The Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas.
Trained in fine arts in Brussels, he left for Paris in the 1960s hoping to make films, and there met a group of artists and filmmakers who were among the first to embrace Pop Art movement.
Peellaert had a surrealist, pop-art style that combined comics, painting, drawing and photography.
He expresses his sardonic humour and criticism of the industrial world in the 1968 psychedelic comic Pravda la survireuse, which was an inspiration to later pop artists.
Other comic-style works include Flipper and The Adventures of Jodelle (Les aventures de Jodelle). The heroines of both Pravda and Les aventures were based on French pop singers.
In 1972, he created the art for the rock 'n' roll chronicle Rock Dreams, with surreal images of artists such as Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, James Brown, Tina Turner and the Who.
The book, created with British rock journalist Nick Cohn, included images such as Otis Redding on the dock of the bay, and the Drifters under the boardwalk.
Peellaert's work has been exhibited around the world, but he had a particular following in Japan.
