Punk artist Jamie Reid, author of the Sex Pistols covers, has passed away

Jamie Reid, the artist who helped define the look of punk with his brilliantly subversive collages and protest art, has died aged 76.
Reid's death was first reported by Louder Than War and confirmed by his gallery, John Marchant. In a post on Instagram, the gallery remembered Reid as “an artist, iconoclast, anarchist, punk, hippie, rebel and romantic”.
Over the course of a career that began in the 1970s, Reid married his anarchist tendencies with art, creating striking works that agitated against the establishment. His best-known designs continue to be the cover art and posters for the Sex Pistols; Once considered controversial, they are now collected by museums from MoMA to the V&A, commanding high prices at auction and adopted by luxury brands.
“Radical ideas will always be appropriated by the mainstream,” Reid told Another Man in 2018. “A lot of this has to do with the fact that the establishment and people in authority really lack the ability to be creative. That’s why we have to keep moving towards new things.”
Reid was born in Liverpool, England, in 1947, to parents who were “die-hard socialists,” in his opinion. At 16, on a whim, he enrolled at Croydon Art School, where he met Malcolm McLaren, the future entrepreneur behind the Sex Pistols (and “the greatest conceptual artist of the 20th century”, according to Reid). The pair apparently participated in a demonstration at the school.
Shortly after graduating, Reid and a group of friends founded a community publishing company called “Suburban Press,” which produced materials ranging from anarchist cookbooks to activist pamphlets. Reid recalled that the DIY spirit behind Suburban would be influential in his graphic design practice.
“I probably learned more from the press than I did from art school,” he said in 1998. “You start to develop an appreciation for what actually looks good – out of sheer necessity, out of no money. Some things gain qualities, others lose qualities. We had to produce things very quickly.”
In the 1970s, Reid was hired by McLaren to work on a "project" which turned out to be the Sex Pistols - a band McLaren formed by recruiting a group of young people who frequented his clothes boutique on the King's Road.

During the Pistols' brief existence, Reid would create instantly iconic images for the band, including the group's hot pink logo, the torn-up Union Jack for the cover of their 1976 single "Anarchy in the UK", and, most famously, the cover of "God Save the Queen” in 1977, which featured an image of Queen Elizabeth II wearing a safety pin in her lip. Some of these album covers, in fact, were so controversial that some stores chose to sell the records in blank sleeves.
All of these looks featured Reid's disjointed cut-and-paste styles, neckline styles that made art out of appropriation, juxtaposition, and provocation, sprinkled with a good dose of humor and situationist thinking. “We just went for it,” Reid recalled of his work with the band. “A huge amount of spontaneity.”
Reid's close collaborator Jon Savage, who compiled the 1987 volume Up They Rise: The Incomplete Works of Jamie Reid, described the artist's work to the Guardian as bottling complexity and sophistication into a "seemingly simple" package. “Compared to some of the rather garish and imitative punk graphics,” he said, “Jamie’s came from a deep place.”
Reid's designs for the Sex Pistols were so potent and enduring that, in the decades that followed, the artist would grow tired of discussing them: "I obviously get tired of the Pistols thing," he told Quietus in 2011. And even more so because Reid, post-Pistols, would embark on projects and activism he considered vital.
In the decades following punk, Reid would work with groups like the Dead Kennedys and Afro Celt Sound System, while designing protest art for causes as diverse as Occupy and the Anti-Poll Tax movement.
His recent work has maintained a distaste for bullies, targeting despotic leaders including Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the latter in support of Pussy Riot following the group's arrest in 2012. In 2009, after Damien Hirst having threatened to sue a student for copyright infringement, Reid delivered the pastiche “God Save Damien Hirst”.
More recently, Reid was investigating his Druid heritage (his great-uncle George Watson MacGregor Reid was head of the Druid Order). He created a series of rotating paintings, titled “Eight-Fold Year”, in 2015, focusing on the eight festivals of the Druidic calendar, and was working on an autobiographical film with Julien Temple about his Druid background.

His final work, “Time For Magic”, was also inspired by Druid rituals. The year-long project seeded a huge Cornish field with flowers, poppies, corn and wild carrots in the shape of Reid's OVA glyph - a circular symbol he created by combining A for "anarchy" and V for "victory". The 328-foot installation concluded its run with John Marchant in May.
“I worked with Jamie for years and years, often speaking three times a day. He was always inspiring, he always said something unexpected, and he was a wonderful teacher,” Marchant told Artnet News. “Jamie and the art establishment were suspicious of each other, but in time everything will work out. As Jamie always said, 'Cheerio. All love.'”

Source: Artnet News