LONDON, April 1 – Glen Baxter, the artist and cartoonist best known in his native Britain for his oddball greetings cards but seen as a “genius” abroad, has died in London aged 82.
Baxter died on Sunday surrounded by his family, the French Semiose public relations agency which represented him said in a statement.
In France, Baxter was hailed as the king of “British phlegm” and a master of the absurd.
Semiose described Baxter’s work as “bewildering nonsensical and tragi-comic, like life itself”.
“Glen Baxter’s oeuvre is immediately recognisable. He has remained true to his simple and highly effective process for almost fifty years: a comic sketch is accompanied by a short, incongruous, even discordant caption,” it said.
Baxter was born in the northern English city of Leeds in 1944 and studied at Leeds College of Art from 1960-65.
He exhibited widely overseas and published numerous books. His work appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Observer and Le Monde.
Collections at London’s Tate Gallery and Victoria & Albert Museum also feature his work.
Baxter’s passion was Surrealism and he enjoyed “lampooning the signifiers of taste such as fine dining and connoisseurship, and misplacing icons of high culture”, according to Flowers Gallery in London where his work is sold.
“His captioned drawings, rendered in ink and crayon, subvert the visual style of adventure comic series such as Biggles and Dan Dare by the inclusion of unconventional narrative twists,” it said on its website.
Although he was relatively little known in Britain, he was much feted abroad.
“Mr Baxter betrays all the ominous symptoms of genius,” the late American artist, writer and theatre designer Edward Gorey once said of him.
His work often “achieved a kind of social-surrealist comedy comparable to the achievements of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Vic Reeves,” according to another admirer, the critic and curator Michael Wilson.
An exhibition celebrating the artist’s life and work will be held at the Semiose Gallery in Paris from May 23 to June 20, the agency added. — AFP
