Starting in the early 1960s, he set himself apart from his contemporaries with paintings that critiqued the cultural dominance of the United States.
Derek Boshier, who rose to prominence in the British Pop Art movement in the early 1960s and went on to make a pop statement of a different sort by collaborating with David Bowie and the Clash, died on Sept. 5 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.
His publicist, Daniel Bee, said the cause was cardiac arrest.
Proudly working-class and left-wing in his work, Mr. Boshier was among the vanguard of Britain’s analogue to the Pop Art movement centered in New York and defined by artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.
As a student at the Royal College of Art in London in 1961, Mr. Boshier was featured in the landmark Young Contemporaries exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, alongside his current and former classmates David Hockney, Allen Jones, R.B. Kitaj and Peter Phillips, all of whom would help shape the movement.
The next year, Mr. Boshier played a prominent role in another seminal showcase of Pop Art on his side of the Atlantic: the BBC documentary “Pop Goes the Easel,” directed by Ken Russell, which also featured Mr. Phillips and the artists Pauline Boty and Peter Blake.
“All the Pop artists had different agendas,” Mr. Boshier said of the British movement in a 2012 video interview. “Peter Phillips and Peter Blake were celebrating American culture. Mine was always a critique.”
His art, he said, was influenced by the work of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher who explored the dehumanizing effect of mass media, as well as related books like Vance Packard’s “The Hidden Persuaders” (1957) and Daniel Boorstin’s “The Image” (1962). A frequent target of his early paintings, he said, was “the Americanization of British culture.”
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