Guy Peellaert, Belgian painter, collagist of surreal art; at 74

Guy Peellaert was commissioned to illustrate movie posters, including a portrait of Robert De Niro in ''Taxi Driver'' (1976). (Posteritati gallery)

WASHINGTON - Guy Peellaert, a Belgian painter-collagist whose fervid imagination produced surreal album covers for John Lennon, David Bowie, and the Rolling Stones, as well as images for a seminal book about rock mythology, "Rock Dreams," died of kidney cancer Nov. 17 at a hospital in Paris. He was 74.

The book was a collaboration with the prominent British rock journalist Nik Cohn, who wrote of how they intended to convey a "cinematic approach" to pop history and "approached the project, not as commentators or fine artists, but primarily as fans."

"Rock Dreams" was published in the early 1970s and reportedly sold more than a million copies. It featured a bloated Jerry Lee Lewis clutching a bottle to his chest and stumbling along a neon-lighted street; the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, drug-dazed and muse-abandoned, sitting alone in a garbage-strewn practice room; Ray Charles, his arm cradling a woman, cruising behind the wheel of a convertible.

In another book with Cohn, "20th-Century Dreams" (1999), Mr. Peellaert envisioned Mussolini walking in on Hitler stretched out on the floor playing with model trains; President Nixon and Mao Zedong weeping at "Lassie" reruns; and President Reagan and the pope comparing footwear while Nancy Reagan struggles to fit Cinderella's spiked heel onto Mother Teresa's foot.

"Rock Dreams" launched the demand for Mr. Peellaert's album illustrations. His work for Bowie's "Diamond Dogs," featuring the singer as a dog-man grotesque, sparked a censorship war in 1974 when the record company erased the dog's genitalia from the original painting.

In what some critics saw as vindication, the erased area reappeared on CD versions of the cover.

Meanwhile, Mr. Peellaert earned commissions to illustrate movie posters, most notably a full-length portrait of Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" (1976).

Mr. Peellaert later created posters for filmmakers Robert Bresson ("L'Argent"), Wim Wenders ("Paris, Texas," "Wings of Desire"), and Robert Altman ("Short Cuts").