Mick Hartley

A sad farewell to the great Glen Baxter.

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.”)

One of Baxter’s favourite tropes was the use of these absurd alternatives to “said”, as was common in the comics of the day – “expostulated” and the like – but his favourite was “blurted”. “New and selected blurtings” was the subtitle of one of his books.

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.

Heidegger and Glen Baxter?? Only the French.

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.

Some featured cartoons. [Artworks? Paintings? Blurtings?]

Glen Baxter here previously: Further Blurtings