The Belgian artist Guy Peellaert, who died last week at 74, was a painter, comic strip artist, theatrical decorator, and photographer whose best-known work mixed a lurid Pop Art style with a mordant wit and the eye of a critical-minded pop culture addict. The 1972 book Rock Dreams, Peelaert's 1974 collaboration with the British critic and journalist Nik Cohn, cemented his legend in pop music circles for his ceramic-looking images: Phil Spector, fitted with headphones and sprawled on his bed as if cut off from the world in an isolation tank; Johnny Cash parting the prison-farm barbed wire with his fingers to stare out mulishly at the society that thought it had cast him aside forever; Ray Charles, supremely cool behind the wheel of a convertible with one arm around a smiling redhead; Mama Cass and Michelle Phillips, nude, sitting cross-legged in what seemed like a post-apocalyptic landscape, though it was probably just the Mohave. Peellaert also designed album covers, the most famous of which is probably his painting of David Bowie as a half-canine sideshow exhibit for Diamond Dogs. Peellaert guaranteed that the first pressings of the album would become instant collectors' items by originally making the critter's genitals plainly visible; in later editions, the Bowie-dog would be gelded by airbrush.

The work by Peellaert and Cohen (who would collaborate again on 1999's 20th-Century Dreams, populated by political and world historical figures) was meant to have the impact of a movie on paper, boiled down to a single haymaker of a still image. That may be why Peellaert never did a "Movie Dreams" book--it might have seemed redundant. But he did accept commissions to do art for movie posters, including Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, and Robert Bresson's L'Argent. His masterpiece in that field, though, was probably his portrait of a haunted Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle for the Taxi Driver poster, stepping away from his cab to explore a mysteriously deserted-looking New York street, as if a real rain had finally come and left him none the happier for it.