It was the freezing winter of 1963 and snow was lying thick on the ground in London when Barry Fantoni, who has died aged 85 of a heart attack, came to fame by unveiling the Duke of Edinburgh in his underpants at the Woodstock gallery. The near lifesize image of Prince Philip in his smalls, surrounded by a kilt, a polo stick and items of naval uniform, in the style of a child’s cut-out doll, caused a sensation after the show was reviewed by the art critic of the Daily Express. Within a week the entire collection of Baz’s first one-man show had been sold to an American art dealer.
The portrait, an early example of pop art, caught the eye of Richard Ingrams, one of the founders of Private Eye magazine, and opened the door for Baz’s 47-year career at the satirical title, during which time he featured in all but 31 of the 1,278 issues. He was a cartoonist, illustrator and member of the jokes team, notably inventing – with Ingrams – the character of EJ Thribb, the magazine’s teenage poet-in-residence.
During the 60s, he was a face of swinging London – Paul McCartney, Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, Marianne Faithfull and Ralph Steadman would hang out at his home and studio in Clapham, south London. In 1966 he became the host of A Whole Scene Going, a BBC show intended to rival ITV’s Ready Steady Go! (for which Baz had designed the set) and Melody Maker named him Top Male TV Celebrity that year. He had his own fanclub.
Baz’s instinctive understanding of popular culture as a working-class Londoner brought a new relevance to Private Eye, whose founders had met at public school. But he was sensitive to how he was seen and angrily denounced an early history of the magazine for portraying him as a “Jewish sex-maniac and a half-wit” for highlighting his amorous pursuit of women at the office.
By contrast, he never spared the subjects of his cartoons and always aimed to “wound or mock” the “miserably corrupt establishment” that were his primary targets. Cartooning was not what he wished to be remembered for, however. “If I could be honest I would put it at the bottom of the list,” he said when I interviewed him in 2009 and we became friends. He could discuss almost any subject and usually find a joke in it.
Away from the Eye, Fantoni worked as a poet, a professional jazz player, a playwright, a painter, a gumshoe detective novelist and a reader of Chinese horoscopes. Poetry was his great passion. “It is the key feature of my life, more than anything else, more than plays, more than the musicals, more than my jazz, more than Private Eye, more than painting, more than everything. It’s the bedrock of my life.”
He adopted the persona of Thribb for public poetry readings alongside Roger McGough, whom he had known since playing sax with McGough’s band the Scaffold in 1967. Always opening with “So farewell then” and usually including the line “That was your catchphrase”, Thribb’s obituary poems could also be designed to wound or mock, Baz said. “That’s the thing about the catchphrase … that’s what really sums you up and you weren’t anything more than that.”
For a time his own catchphrase was Little Man in a Little Box, the title of the pop song that Davies wrote for him, which he recorded in 1966 and would perform as a support act to the Spencer Davis Group. It was a reference to the age of television – (“You can turn me on, you can switch me off”) – but it would be good Thribb material, following Baz’s burial in Turin’s monumental cemetery. He could find humour in death. It amused him that his mother had “wryly noted” the irony in his father’s death, also from a heart attack, while watching This Is Your Life.
Baz was born in Epping, Essex, to where his mother had been evacuated from Stepney, east London, during the second world war. His Italian father, Peter (born Paolo) Fantoni, was an artist, and his Jewish mother, Sarah (known as Maxi, nee Deverell) was a musician, of French and Dutch extraction. Baz grew up in south London and painted landscapes from the roof of the family flat on Brixton Hill.
He attended Archbishop Temple school before joining Camberwell School of Art on a scholarship before his 15th birthday. At 18 he was expelled for multiple misdemeanours, including depicting the staff naked in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec. While travelling in France, he contracted tuberculosis. Admitted to hospital on his return to London, he watched fellow patients dying on his ward. That experience, he later explained, was where his work drive came from.
He resumed his education at the Slade School of Fine Art and then came the exhibition that brought him to the attention of Ingrams. He went on to have a further six solo exhibitions (including Caricatures by Barry Fantoni at the National Portrait Gallery in 2007) and five joint exhibitions with his father, and took part in 11 group shows.
The Eye’s fortnightly publishing rhythm allowed him multiple careers. From the mid-1960s he taught at Croydon College of Art, alongside Bridget Riley. He was a diary cartoonist (1983-90) and art critic (1973-77) for the Times, and his caricatures were a fixture in the Listener for 20 years (1968-88). He put on plays in Paris and London. But for Baz there was never enough time. On leaving the Eye in 2010, he told colleagues there was “still so much else I’ve got left to do”.
Depechism, an art movement which he founded in 2012 after moving to Calais, was emblematic of his need to produce work quickly. The Depechist “manifesto” decreed that each painting must be completed within a time limit set by the length of the canvas. It seemed like an idea suited to the digital age, but Baz was making a protest, he said, against the “Saatchiism and Serotaism” of the “empty” arts establishment, from which he felt alienated.
In the same year he published Harry Lipkin PI, a slick novel about “the world’s oldest private detective”. It was set in Miami, even though the author (who did not fly) had never visited the city.
Baz married Tessa Reidy in 1972. They had separated by the time he met Katie Dominy, an art and design journalist and editor, who became his partner in 1996 and who survives him. In search of his Italian roots, in 2016 Baz moved with Katie to a riverside flat in Turin, where he produced two memoirs, A Whole Scene Going On (2019) and Breasts As Apples (2023), more pictures, short plays and a collection of brief poems, Poems You May Have Missed (2021), mimicking the style of famous poets. The Italian obsession with ice-cream and national tendency to talk noisily were things he complained of, often loudly and in public.
In 2022 he spent months in hospital, critically ill with heart problems, but somehow he came back to life and returned to his projects. “I have a huge pile of work ahead,” he told me in an email last month. However, in the time-honoured phrasing of Private Eye editors: “That’s enough Barry – Ed.”