Guy Peellaert achieved fame as an artist who embraced the attitudes and methods of the Pop Art movement, surrealism and psychedelia. He created iconic images of rock’n’roll stars of the 1960s and 1970s, most famously David Bowie and the Rolling Stones. His art was exhibited in Paris, New York, London, Tokyo, Cuba, Brazil and Italy.

Guy Peellaert was born in 1934 and grew up in postwar Brussels, studying fine art with dreams of working in the film industry. He also fell under the spell of US culture — “Belgium,” he once said, “was a little like a US colony: we had more Hollywood movies than France.”

Peellaert started his career as an advertising artist and set designer before being drawn into the Pop Art movement. By the time he first came to public attention, as an experimental cartoonist, he had moved to Paris, where the radical cultural and political changes of the 1960s were in full swing. In 1966 he produced one of the first Pop Art comic strips, Les aventures de Jodelle, inspired by the French singer Sylvie Vartan. This was followed in 1968 by Pravda la Survireuse (Pravda the Overdriver).

Peellaert made his name with Rock Dreams (1973), a collaboration with the English rock writer Nik Cohn. The book meditated on the obsessions and mythologies of rock’n’roll. Peellaert used a mix of photography, paint and drawing manipulated into collages to accompany the surreal text. He placed some of the generation’s biggest icons, from Elvis to Bob Dylan, in fantastical, bizarre, intimate and often scandalous situations: a pink satin-tinged Jim Morrison squatting in his bath; the Rolling Stones dressed in Nazi uniforms surrounded by young girls; the Beatles having tea with the Queen. Rock Dreams sold more than a million copies worldwide. John Lennon, who was portrayed with Elvis in the book, had this image framed.

Peellaert’s work was in vogue. He was called upon to design album covers for stars across the globe: the Rolling Stones’ It’s Only Rock ’N Roll album and David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs LP, which depicted the musician as a grotesque mix of man and dog with genitalia that were quickly airbrushed when the record was first distributed in 1974. His reputation rapidly flourished in the US as he was commissioned, on the back of his success, to design posters for some of the biggest cult films of the 1970s including Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, starring Robert De Niro, as well as Wim Wenders’s The Wings of Desire (1987) and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993).

In 1986 he collaborated with the US writer Michael Herr on The Big Room. This book explored the US love affair with success through montage images of Marilyn Monroe and Sugar Ray Robinson. In 1999 Peellaert again teamed up with Cohn for 21st Century Dreams. He cut and pasted, in awkward and often shocking juxtaposition, images of Bill Clinton, Diana, Princess of Wales, Stalin and Freud. In the same year he was commissioned by the French Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement to design his Christmas greeting cards for members of the Government. The cards depicted great French historical figures including Clémenceau, De Gaulle, the minister himself and Napoleon in a compromising position with an armour-suited Joan of Arc.

Peellaert’s art was generated in his workshop in Paris. He had a vast hoard of magazines and rock’n’roll memorabilia often donated by admirers. He was inspired by not only rock music but also by the paintings of the Old Masters and was a habitué of many of the city’s galleries. His later work, including 21st Century, experimented with computer technology. However, he continued to use paint and pencil, and worked up until his death creating images of Belgian rock musicians for the Belgian media weekly Focus Knack. Herr described Peellaert as “a born icon-painter in a world that uses up icons like paper plates”.

Peellaert is survived by his wife, Elizabet, and their son.

Guy Peellaert, Pop artist, was born on April 6, 1934. He died of cancer on November 17, 2008, aged 74