admin Artist and graphic designer Jamie Reid—the creator of, most famously, the cover art for the Sex Pistols 1976 “Anarchy in the U.K.” and 1977 “God Save the Queen” singles—has died at the age of 76. The “Anarchy” single featured a torn and tattered Union Jack flag beneath ransom-note-like décollage lettering torn from newspapers that spelled out “Sex Pistols”; Reid’s “God Save the Queen” artwork, more notoriously, featured his defacement of Cecil Beaton’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, replete with a safety pin through her mouth. It was an iconic image that, in one fell swoop, brought together Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols’ multivalent attack of music, art, politics, anarchy, and provocation, instantly defining the popular image of punk. Reid also created the artwork for the Sex Pistols’ 1977 landmark debut album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, as well as other singles for the band and their film, The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle.
Reid’s Brighton-based gallerist, John Marchant, announced the news, describing Reid in a statement as an “artist, iconoclast, anarchist, punk, hippie, rebel and romantic.” Born into a socialist family in Croydon, South London, in 1947, Reid attended art colleges in Wimbledon and Croydon in the late ’60s. At the latter he met up with McLaren, bonding over a shared interest in Guy Debord and his Situationist International, an avant garde organization of revolutionaries and political and social theorists who distilled the 20th century’s most pointed and provocative critiques of capitalism into a juggernaut that inspired the massive strikes and civil unrest that convulsed Paris in May 1968.
In 1970, Reid cofounded a radical political magazine, Suburban Press. In 1974 he designed a book of Situationist texts, Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International. Six years later, when McLaren was putting together what became the Sex Pistols out of the Kings Road fetish-gear shop, Sex, that he ran with Vivienne Westwood, Reid became the de facto art director of the Pistols.
While the Sex Pistols’ brief run of infamy imploded by January of 1978, after their brief American tour, Reid created art, lectured at schools, designed a recording studio, and protested everything from anti-gay legislation to Damien Hirst. (When, in 2009, Hirst threatened to sue a student for copyright infringement, Reid reimagined his “God Save the Queen” artwork with the words “God Save Damien Hirst,” telling the Guardian that “I find it ironic that people like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin talk about punk being a major influence. To me they’re Thatcher’s children, because they were put into power by Saatchi & Saatchi.”) More recently, he created savage artworks deriding Donald Trump and celebrity culture in general. A 1987 collection of Reid’s work, Up They Rise: The Incomplete Works of Jamie Reid, which also featured interviews and text from author and noted punk historian Jon Savage, collected his work up to that time.
