Derek Boshier, Pop Artist Who Made Work for David Bowie, Dies at 87

Derek Boshier, a British Pop artist who went on to supply work for a spread of musicians, from David Bowie to The Conflict, has died at 87. A consultant for the artist confirmed his dying on Thursday to the PA newswire. A reason for dying was not supplied.

Throughout the Sixties, Boshier turned one of many foremost figures of the Pop motion in England, the place, alongside artists reminiscent of Pauline Boty and Allen Jones, he envisioned a tradition remodeled by consumerism. His unusual, absorbing work from the early a part of the ’60s centered on what he referred to as “Américanisation,” referring to the movement of distinctly American imagery into England in the course of the postwar period.

England’s Glory (1962), certainly one of his most well-known work, options the Union Jack beneath matchboxes whose surfaces seem to dissolve into American flags. The portray testifies to the awkward rigidity between British patriotism and common American promoting—one thing that Boshier made literal within the portray’s middle, the place a scrawled quote from the Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson is seen alongside a Yogi Bear picture used to market Kellogg’s merchandise.

Different works from that period are extra ambiguous. The Identi-Package Man (1962), a chunk at present owned by the Tate museum community, shows a person whose physique seems to dissemble into jigsaw items. His arms mutate into striped appendages which might be massaged by outsized toothbrushes. The patterns on his arms notably recall these of the American flag.

Among the many common public, Boshier is most well-known for the artwork he produced for musicians. For David Bowie’s 1979 album Lodger, Boshier, working alongside the photographer Duffy, contributed a canopy wherein the pop star seems to fall via house. And for Bowie’s 1983 LP Let’s Dance, Boshier as soon as once more crafted cowl artwork displaying the singer; right here, Bowie might be seen alongside an assortment of letters meant to information a dancer via a predetermined choreography.

For The Conflict, Boshier produced the artwork for the rock band’s Second Songbook. Joe Strummer, the band’s frontman, had reached out to Boshier concerning the undertaking, and the artist recalled that the précis was easy. Boshier recalled Strummer as saying: “I’ll ship you the lyrics, do what you want, only one factor: embody someplace on the quilt the image for nuclear waste.”

Derek Boshier was born in Portsmouth in 1937. He went on to review at London’s Royal School of Artwork between 1959 and 1962, a interval when his cohort additionally included David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, and others who would come to outline the British artwork scene within the coming years.

Inside the US, the nation the place he would in the end find yourself, Boshier has not been so widely known as a key determine inside the historical past of Pop. However in England, he is considered one of many motion’s core figures. Within the eccentric 1962 documentary Pop Goes the Easel, Ken Russell created a portrait of the emergent motion by profiling 4 artists. Certainly one of them was Boshier, who appeared earlier than Russell’s digital camera alongside Peter Blake and Pauline Boty.

In 1980, Boshier moved to Texas to show on the College of Houston. He continued to supply oddball artwork that earned him fame within the native scene. Throughout the ’80s, he painted Klansmen, cowboys, and parodies of the artwork world, all utilizing thick swaths of paint that owed one thing to the Neo-Expressionist motion of the day. The pile-up of symbols he added tended to confuse viewers. In a 1985 Artforum assessment, a befuddled Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom wrote, “It’s tempting to learn this portray within the method of an astral projection of hermeneutics, however maybe it’s our obsession that insists upon seeing these shards of orbiting tradition as slowly turning tropes.”

Boshier moved again to England in 1992, then returned to the US as soon as extra in 1997, remaining in Los Angeles for the remainder of his profession. He continued to supply artwork, increasing past portray, into mediums reminiscent of video and set up.

The artist continued to work up till the very finish, presenting new work as not too long ago as this previous spring at Los Angeles’s Evening Gallery. His restlessness befit an artist whose motto was “Artwork ’Til You Drop.”