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Jamie Reid, the graphic designer who outlined the visible character of punk along with his designs for recordings made by the Intercourse Pistols within the late Seventies, has died aged 76. His household and the John Marchant Gallery, managers of the Jamie Reid Archive, issued a press release describing Reid as an “artist, iconoclast, anarchist, punk, hippie, insurgent and romantic. Jamie leaves behind a beloved daughter Rowan, a granddaughter Rose, and an unlimited legacy.”
Writing in The Artwork Newspaper in 2022, Louisa Buck described Reid’s cowl artwork for the Intercourse Pistols’ single “God Save the Queen” as “arguably essentially the most iconic punk picture of all time. The truth that it was designed in 1977, within the yr of the Queen’s silver jubilee, makes it all of the extra provocative. Reid’s violent subversion of a basic black-and-white picture of the Queen (taken by the royal photographer Peter Grugeon)—by ripping away the eyes and mouth and substituting the title of the one and the band’s title utilizing lettering lower out of newspaper headlines within the method of a ransom notice—affords the right visible expression of the Pistols’ snarling lyrics: “God Save the Queen/she ain’t no human being/There isn’t a future/in England’s dreaming”.
Jamie MacGregor Reid was born in Croydon, south London in 1947, however at all times felt a powerful connection to his Scottish roots—his father, Metropolis editor of the Every day Sketch, was from Inverness. Jamie studied at John Ruskin Grammar College, Wimbledon Faculty of Artwork, earlier than enrolling at Croydon Faculty of Artwork in 1964.
He lower his graphic enamel as a co-founder of the unconventional political journal Suburban Press, creating a low-cost newspaper reducing and “ransom notice” look that marched with the journal’s anarchic anti-capitalist character, expressed by densely typed Situationist campaigning journalism—aimed largely on the redevelopment of Croydon’s city centre.
In one in every of his final interviews, for The Press and Journal, Reid recounted how he was residing on the Isle of Lewis, within the west of Scotland, concerned in group politics when a telegram arrived from an previous pal from his Croydon Artwork College days, the music supervisor Malcolm McLaren, asking him if he would make designs for a brand new band — the Intercourse Pistols.
After his era-defining designs for “God Save the Queen”, Reid created the art work for 2 extra Pistols singles through the band’s temporary however unmissable reign within the charts—”Fairly Vacant” and “Holidays within the Solar”—in addition to the album By no means Thoughts the Bollocks Right here’s the Intercourse Pistols.
For a few years Reid saved a studio in Whitechapel, east London, and, whereas remaining a community-centred radical all his life, he developed his artwork output in chastely summary and druidically impressed instructions, exhibiting broadly in Britain and overseas. He labored with different bands together with the Useless Kennedys and Afro Celt Sound System, and produced protest work for actions together with the Anti Ballot Tax Alliance and Pussy Riot. He produced a ten-year cycle of installations on the Strongroom Studios in London. X-Giant, a 2016 exhibition at Beams Gallery, Tokyo, included vitrines of newspaper cuttings and collage marginalia, a function of his exhibits over 4 a long time. His work is within the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate, the Museum of Superb Artwork in Houston and MoMA in New York.
One in every of Reid’s most up-to-date exhibitions, which closed in Could, was Jamie Reid: Time for Magic, a year-long land artwork undertaking, timed to the druidic calendar, on the Misplaced Gardens of Heligan, at St Austell, in Cornwall, by which Reid’s OVA glyph—his magic image combining the Anarchy A with a V for Victory, and symbolising (with ova, the Latin for egg) the cycle of start and rebirth—was sown into the panorama, in cornflowers, corncockle, poppies and wild carrot.
Reid’s OVA glyph instagram.com/jamie_reid_archive
“I consider that you would be able to really change issues,” Reid informed The Press and Journal. “It’s attainable. Folks would possibly go in for the nostalgia however they can even see how my work could be overly political and barely non secular. It’s extra related now than it’s ever been.”
James MacGregor Reid; born Croydon, south London, 16 January 1947; associate of Margi Clarke (one daughter); died 8 August 2023.
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