Visual art - Simon Wilson draws attention to the singular gifts of Jim Leon

An extraordinary but little-known British artist is being commemorated this spring in a retrospective at the town of Morestel, near Lyons, in France. Born in Wolverhampton in 1938, Jim Leon was the first of 13 children. The family soon moved to Birmingham, where he attended Handsworth Grammar School. At 16, he went on to Birmingham School of Art from which, three years later, he was expelled for indiscipline. In 1959, he married Monique Verchere, a French au pair, and in 1960 they returned to her native Lyons, which became Leon's adopted city and where he died of cancer in 2002.

Leon had outstanding talent as both a draughtsman and a painter. He was equally possessed of extraordinary, indeed visionary, imaginative powers. It was the combination of these gifts that gave rise to the startling, entirely unique and personal works of art that flowed from his brush and pen from the moment he arrived in Lyons.

His early work blended influences from Francis Bacon, surrealism and the baroque. Lurking there is also the English visionary William Blake, together with the obsessive Romanticism of the pre-Raphaelites. A number of his early paintings and drawings refer to William Burroughs's Naked Lunch (first published in Paris in 1959). These were just some of the ingredients of an amazing, semi-abstract, spatially complex, ritualistic, orgiastic flesh-painting, expressing highly wrought morbidity, eroticism, transcendence and ecstasy; astonishing explorations of the murkier depths of the human mind.

Tuning in to another part of the 1960s zeitgeist, Leon began a parallel series of pop paintings - fantastic celebrations of food, sex and flesh, brilliantly coloured in fairground and seaside-rock hues. These two groups of work alone should allow him a niche in history. The first may be said to constitute a late flowering of surrealism, while the second is a highly individual contribution to pop at its most intense moment.

Leon's painting was subversive, but he was still operating, just, within the traditional fine-art world. In the October following the turbulent end of the Sixties, however, he left his family and the city of Lyons, and spent the next four years in London and the United States. During this period, he became part of the underground or counter-culture that, among other things, was founding its own newspapers and magazines as a platform for its calls for radical social change.

Leon had already been to the US in 1969, when he went to California. While there, he created a cover for the underground journal the Berkeley Barb and participated in the creation of the People's Park at Berkeley. In London, he contributed to International Times, Rolling Stone, Friends/Frendz and, most importantly, Oz. This magazine became a cause celebre for the underground when, in 1971, its three editors were prosecuted for obscenity in the now famous "Schoolkids" issue and were sent to prison. The 26-day Old Bailey trial be-came a locus classicus in the story of the clash of the 1960s generation with the old establishment. Oz in fact continued publication until the end of 1973, its circulation greatly enhanced by the notoriety, and Leon became its most important contributor of art. He provided 13 works for the last 18 issues, including one cover and several centre spreads. In particular, he drew End of an Era, a spectacular diptych that appeared while the editors were awaiting trial. Based on the biblical story of Lot and his two daughters, it shows the trio making love against a background showing the apocalyptic destruction of the decadent world they have left behind. A very 1960s allegory, which has continued relevance this year, with Leon's retrospective overlapping a full-blown examination of psychedelia and the underground in Tate Liverpool's forthcoming "Summer of Love" exhibition.

This work was important to Leon because he was happy to see his art "reproduced in print runs of 90,000, reaching huge numbers of people, rather than seeing it disappear into the privacy of a middle-class drawing room, lost for ever". The same was true of the sets and costumes he created for theatre directors such as Roger Planchon, and for the film Peau d'ane starring Catherine Deneuve, with whom Leon fell hopelessly in love. Other populist works of his include posters for rock concerts and the murals he made for a number of restaurants in Lyons.

Then, in February 1974, on a huge LSD trip, Leon had a mystical experience in which he was visited, he said, by a divinity he called the Goddess of Nature. From that time, his art was increasingly devoted to an ideal vision of nature. This development, which continued to the end of his life, was revealed in a solo show at Lyons's Galerie Verriere in 1984. At the time, I described these works as evocations of the world "as it was, or as it will be, or could be - healed from the ravages of man, a paradise regained, presided over by a few seraphic beings of enigmatic and radiant beauty, or by infinitely mysterious inanimate objects - mineral structures like great jewels, giant crystalline eggs broken open to reveal shells layered in rainbow hues, shamanistic objects and translucent prismatic spheres and ovoids. In some, giant water spouts career across a primeval sea."

In art-historical terms, Leon's landscapes belong to, and are a fresh extension of, the tradition founded in France by Claude Lorrain and, in Leon's case, tracked through the English visionary landscapist Samuel Palmer. The paradisiacal vision of Leon's later work needs no further justification.

But what of the much bleaker, often troubling vision of the 1960s and early 1970s? This belongs to a long tradition: that of artists who feel driven to explore the darker side of human nature. But Leon's purpose was to raise our self-awareness and ultimately to bring about a more enlightened world. He was always on the side of the disadvantaged and the oppressed. He was resolutely anti-materialist. He never owned property. He never had any money. He was, indeed, a kind of holy innocent. He was also impossible, but he was, in some sense, an example to us all.

"Jim Leon: anathemes et billets doux" is at the Maison Ravier, Morestel (www.maisonravier.com) until 29 May.

"Summer of Love: art of the psychedelic era" is at Tate Liverpool (0151 702 7400) from 27 May to 25 September

Simon Wilson is an art historian and former Tate curator

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