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.

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