Derek Boshier, British Pop artist widely known for his collaborations with David Bowie, has died, aged 87

The British Pop artist Derek Boshier, who was born in Portsmouth in 1937, died on 5 September at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87. The galleries that represented and showed his work—including Gazelli Art House in London, Night Gallery in Los Angeles and Garth Greenan in New York—confirmed the news of his death.

Boshier gained international renown for album cover designs for musicians such as David Bowie and The Clash, but during a restless career that continued until the time of his death he moved between painting, drawing, photography, film and video, assemblage and installation. Like the work of the slightly older British Pop artist, Richard Hamilton, Boshier’s early paintings were satiric and looked at US military power and consumer culture that featured cowboys, toothbrushes on striped toothpaste, the atomic bomb and the Pepsi logo as a landscape’s sun. (American Pop art by the likes of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist, in contrast, tended to be more deadpan.)

“My work has always been about pop culture,” Boshier said in a 2017 interview with Art Zealous. “I did my first Pop art painting in 1961. It was very small and called Situation in Cuba (it’s now in a museum in Havana). It’s the Cuban flag with the American flag eating into it and it was a response to JFK’s Bay of Pigs. My work from the 1970s became overtly political because I gave up painting for 13 years; I didn’t think it could describe what I was feeling at the time, as I was so involved with left-wing politics.”

Even during the last 30 years of Boshier’s life, when he made Los Angeles his permanent home, concerns about police brutality, gun control and the growth of the far right in the US, as well as the country’s consumerism, continued to be prominent subjects of his artwork.

Boshier was the subject of two recent exhibition, one of which—Strange Lands, which took place this past spring at Los Angeles’s Night Gallery—was a science fiction-inflected show of paintings that mixed extraterrestrial aliens, demons, zombies and centaurs, often in battle, with the sky blackened by bombers and helicopters. It was the artist’s fourth show with Night Gallery since beginning to work with the gallery in 2013.

“It was inspiring to work with an artist who was so unwavering in his visual language while remaining intellectually fresh and never ceasing to surprise his audience,” Davida Nemeroff, Night Gallery’s owner, says. “He had the ability to examine and dissect popular culture over his lifetime, which made his work constantly relevant and poignant, while always bringing his unapologetic sense of humour to his work.”

A concurrent online exhibition with Garth Greenan Gallery, Drawn From Life, brought together a selection of Boshier’s drawings from 1962 to 2020.

In 1962, the year he graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Boshier was included in a BBC documentary Pop Goes the Easel, which identified him and a group of his classmates—including David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Frank Bowling, Allen Jones, Peter Blake, Peter Phillips and Pauline Boty—as a leading group of new voices in British Pop art. “The world’s in peril (and it’s not possible to) avoid being in politics, whether one likes it or not,” Boshier told the documentary’s director, Ken Russell, on screen.

An important influence on these and other British artists of the period was Richard Smith (1931-2016), who taught at the Royal Academy and travelled to the US in the late 1950s, bringing back to the UK information about Jasper Johns and other emerging artists who were incorporating popular images into their paintings.

Boshier’s old classmate Peter Phillips, now 85, recalls Boshier fondly. “We shared a flat in London for a while when we were students at the Royal College of Arts,” he says. “When I was the president of the Young Contemporaries 1961 exhibition, Derek was instrumental in helping make the show a success. Of course, that exhibition really catalysed the Pop art movement in England. A year later, we were featured in Ken Russell’s film, Pop Goes the Easel, along with Pauline Boty and Peter Blake. It was a ton of fun.”

Like his former classmate Peter Blake, who co-created the cover image for The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, Boshier gained worldwide attention for his work with British musical acts, such as his cover art for the David Bowie albums Lodger (1979) and Let’s Dance (1983). The pre-Photoshop photographic image of Bowie on Lodger shows him lying on his back with his nose bent and his legs in a twisted position as though he were Major Tom having fallen back to earth. In 1978, the punk group The Clash included reproductions of the artist’s paintings and drawings in its songbook Give ‘Em Enough Rope.

That connection with The Clash was the outcome of Boshier’s work as a teacher at London’s Central School of Art and Design during the early 1970s, where one of his students was John Mellor, who took on the name Joe Strummer when he formed his band.

• Derek Boshier; born Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, 1937; died Los Angeles, California, US, 5 September 2024.