Glen Baxter, surrealist known in Britain for his greetings cards but hailed as a genius abroad

Glen Baxter, who has died aged 82, created a unique artistic universe populated by erudite cowboys, tweed-clad empire-builders and malevolent boy scouts that made him a staple of the jokey end of the greetings-card market in Britain but saw him hailed on the Continent as a modern Surrealist master.

Baxter’s art pastiched the crude illustrations found in the Boys’ Own annuals and Western comics he had devoured in his youth, resulting in an idiosyncratic and instantly recognisable faux naïf style. As with the American cartoonist Gary Larson, each drawing would derive much of its effect from the artfully deadpan accompanying caption, although Baxter ventured farther than Larson into the realm of the purely absurd.

Sometimes the drawings themselves would be offbeat. One featured a man sawing off his own leg in front of two children, with the caption “Uncle Frank would keep us amused for hours”; another featured a colonial type pouring coffee into a cup from a tube in his ear (“‘My career prospects may seem dim, Cynthia, but I will always have my talent,’ blurted Rodney.”)

Other pictures would depend for their effect wholly on the caption: a grand lady surveying a bookcase in a library – “‘I’m afraid your collection of pornography regretfully displays at least two glaring omissions,’ noted Lady Biswold” – or two co-habitees glowering at each other: “The tension at No 83 had been almost unbearable ever since Eric had deliberately swallowed Toby’s anorak.”

He had a particular fondness for subverting the clichés of the Wild West, explaining that “if you are looking at a common image and realise it is not quite right, the frisson is all the greater.” One picture of stetson-clad cowpokes barging through a doorway was captioned: “There was always an unseemly rush for seats at the crochet seminar.”

Baxter’s work appeared regularly in The New Yorker, Vogue and The Observer, but seemed to have less in common with the average pocket cartoonist than with the pure nonsense tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear; indeed, Baxter refused to describe himself as a cartoonist, because of the implication of being a purveyor of easy laughs.

One of his confounding running gags was to bestow on tough or sinister characters the name Brenda, as in a drawing for The New Yorker of a fearsome Albanian brigand placing his foot on a round brown object, with the caption: “It soon became apparent that Brenda would not be sharing the meat-ball with us, after all.” The printers at The New Yorker returned it to the editorial staff with the note: “Doesn’t look like a Brenda to me.”

As with Monty Python, this was surrealism in a form that appealed to a wide public, and in the 1980s postcards and greetings cards featuring Baxter’s work sold in huge numbers in Britain. He became even more familiar through lucrative, though characteristically unorthodox, advertising campaigns for products such as Gilbey’s Gin.

But although Baxter became something approaching a household name, some critics considered him badly under-appreciated. In 1994 The Sunday Telegraph’s art critic John McEwen urged readers to visit an exhibition of his work at the Eagle Gallery, declaring that “the originals differ from the reproductions as much as live fish from dead ones. The colours are thickly and subtly worked in crayon, the captions balanced to be seen as part of the overall design, size is important, all combined in pursuit of the indefinable.”

Baxter was exhibited more frequently in the United States, Australia and Europe than in his native Britain; his work was held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Pompidou Centre. In France he was so famous that “un Baxter” became a widespread phrase for an absurd situation, and the French critics compared him variously with the Dadaists, Heidegger and Jonathan Swift.

Some admirers thought that he might have been nominated for the Turner Prize if only his work had not made hay with certain tendencies in modern art. One drawing featured a professorial type in a gallery reading a framed piece of paper, with the caption: “‘It seems we’ve become an integral part of this installation piece,’ boomed the eminent critic.”

Although there were complaints about what one critic called his “elephantine whimsy”, Baxter secured many eminent fans, including John Cleese, Billy Connolly and Tom Stoppard. Salman Rushdie wrote an introduction to his graphic novel The Billiard Table Murders (1990) praising his “casual bizarreries”, and the future King Charles asked for a Baxter drawing to be commissioned for his 40th birthday. Baxter mischievously obliged with a bucolic scene in which “two Scottish lairds are marching along, and across a stream there is a croft, but it has a Philip Johnson postmodern extension.”

Glen Baxter was born in Leeds on March 4 1944, the son of Charlie Baxter, a welder, and his wife Florence. Baxter recalled that his father was always puzzled by his artistic ambitions: “I rang him up and said, ‘I’m going to New York… for an exhibition,’ and he said, ‘An exhibition of what?’ ‘My drawings, Dad,’ I said. ‘What drawings?’ ‘Dad, you know, my pictures.’ ‘Oh, that stuff.’”

As a boy Glen was afflicted by a bad stammer, with the result that he would often go on an errand for his mother and return with an unwanted item because he could not say what was required; he had to overpay on bus journeys if he could not manage to pronounce the stop he wanted. On one occasion he concentrated so hard on getting out the words when sent to procure collar studs for his father that he failed to notice he had gone into a furniture shop by mistake. “When I discovered surrealism at Leeds [College of Art] I felt I was home and dry, it was like my life,” he recalled.

Always feeling out of kilter with his contemporaries, he defied the fashion for abstract art in the 1960s and embraced Magritte and Breton, admiring the “bland, academic painterly style” that made their outlandish juxtapositions of everyday images all the more discomfiting.

He taught at the V&A from 1967, and then lectured part-time at Goldsmith’s College from 1974 to 1986. He had ambitions to be a writer and first had his poems and stories published in an underground magazine called Small Faeces: “My mother and father would have fallen off the chair at the idea.” He began to illustrate his pieces, and soon the pictures came to dominate and the words were reduced to captions.

He had his first exhibition in New York in 1974 – Edward Gorey bought 10 drawings and declared that Baxter ‘‘betrays all the ominous symptoms of genius” – and his first book of drawings was published in Amsterdam in 1979. In the 1980s he finally began to come to the notice of his fellow countrymen and published successful collections of his works, including The Impending Gleam (1981), Jodhpurs in the Quantocks (1986) and Glen Baxter Returns to Normal (1992). The Wonder Book of Sex (1995) was a spoof lovers’ manual, introducing readers to novelties such as “The Dundee Position”, which involved bagpipes.

A puckish, bristling-haired figure, Baxter was amiable and unpretentious, though he admitted to some annoyance at not being taken as seriously in Britain as abroad. Fed up with inane responses when he told people that he was an artist, he preferred to tell strangers that he was “in the paint business”.

He worked at his home in a Georgian terraced house in Camberwell, in a studio lined with Twin Peaks videos, cowboy annuals and church surplice catalogues; daytime television played silently in the background while Australian birdsong was piped into the room.

Baxter was close friends with the mercurial humorist Ivor Cutler, and recalled that they had once improvised a superb radio play together, only for it to transpire that Cutler had forgotten to switch on the tape recorder.

He is survived by his wife Carole, whom he married in 1970, and their five children.

Glen Baxter, born March 4 1944, died March 29 2026​

[Source: Daily Telegraph]