Tom Phillips was a true polymath. A painter, poet, and composer, Phillips has exhibited worldwide. His work is in the British Museum, the Tate, New York's Museum of Modern Art, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. His books include A Humument and an illustrated translation of Dante's Inferno. He is survived by his wife, the music critic Fiona Maddocks.

(The following is excerpted from the full bio by David Jennings.)

Tom Phillips was born in South London in 1937. Alongside his regular studies at Oxford, he attended drawing classes and lectures on Renaissance iconography. He then enrolled at the Camberwell School of Art, in the neighborhood where he lived and worked nearly all his life - taught by Frank Auerbach and, later, Charles Howard. He would go on to become an accomplished artist, musician, writer, scholar, curator, and teacher.

Phillips's first one-man exhibition was a sold-out show at the AIA Gallery in London in 1965. Four years later, he won a John Moores prize. Even so, in the late 1960s, Phillips was better known for his musical activities (both classical and with Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra), including his own compositions performed by the pianist John Tilbury.

During Phillips’ teaching career at Ipswich, Bath, and Wolverhampton art schools, he introduced Brian Eno, his best student, to the ideas that helped Eno develop ambient and generative music. Philips created concrete poetry for John Cage and developed Irma: The Score, an entire opera extracted from the pages of his most enduring work, A Humument. A new production of Irma, directed by Netia Jones, premiered at the South London Gallery in September 2017.

A Humument - the longest of Phillips’ extended serial projects - began in 1966 when he challenged himself to make art out of the first secondhand book he could find for three pence on Peckham Rye. A Humument is a radical treatment of a forgotten Victorian novel using collage, cut-up, painting, and other techniques. In 2016, on the fiftieth anniversary of its inception, Phillips completed the sixth and final version of this work – each version containing successively more pages reworked until his original piece had itself been completely transformed.

A Humument is a touchstone of Phillips's oeuvre. The Royal Academy’s 2015 Summer Exhibition dedicated a full room to it. Quotations from A Humument populate his other paintings, works of art criticism, and some of the songs he wrote when returning to music in the 1990s.

For several decades, from the mid-1970s, Phillips also received commissions for site-specific artworks and portraits.  He made tapestries for Oxford, sculpture for the Imperial War Museum, street mosaics for his native Peckham, and ornament and memorials for sacred spaces, including both Westminster Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. Portrait subjects included Samuel Beckett and friends such as Iris Murdoch, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Richard Morphet (keeper of the Tate Modern collection until 1998), and the Monty Python team. In 1989, he became the second artist to have a retrospective of portraits at the National Portrait Gallery.

Phillips received the Frances Williams Memorial Prize in 1983 for his illustration and new translation of Dante's Inferno. He also made a TV version of the Inferno with Peter Greenaway, which won them the Italia prize, jointly as directors.

Tom Phillips’ works are now in specialist collections across the world, including the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry (University of Iowa Library), the Palazzo Butera (Palermo), National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), National Art Library (V&A, London), and the Ashmolean Museum, with an archive of his papers in the Bodleian Library (both Oxford).