David Bowie on his favourite visual artists
Not only was David Bowie a highly successful musician, but he was also a painter and prolific collector of art. In 1976, he bought a chalet in the hills of Lake Geneva, where he dedicated much of his time to creating post-modernist artworks. According to his biographer, Christopher Sandford: “Not only did he become a well-known patron of expressionist art: locked in Clos des Mésanges he began an intensive self-improvement course in classical music and literature, and started work on an autobiography.”
It seems as though, for Bowie, art was as important as food for him to survive and maintain his creativity. During an interview with The New York Times, the musician had an in-depth conversation with Michael Kimmelman about art, where he explained: “It has always been for me a stable nourishment.” Discussing his collection, he said: “I collected very early on. I have a couple of Tintorettos, which I’ve had for many, many years. I have a Rubens. Art was, seriously, the only thing I’d ever wanted to own.”
Furthermore, Bowie detailed how he used art to influence his moods. “I use it. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings,” he said. “The same work can change me in different ways, depending on what I’m going through.” This led him to discuss one of his favourite painters, Frank Auerbach. He explained: “I think there are some mornings that if we hit each other a certain way – myself and a portrait by Auerbach – the work can magnify the kind of depression I’m going through. It will give spiritual weight to my angst. “Some mornings, I’ll look at it and go: ‘Oh, God, yeah! I know!'”
He continued: “But that same painting, on a different day, can produce in me an incredible feeling of the triumph of trying to express myself as an artist. I can look at it and say: ‘My God, yeah! I want to sound like that looks.'” Bowie explained in further detail why he was such a fan of Auerbach, one of the School of London’s leading names alongside Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. He said: “I find his kind of bas-relief way of painting extraordinary. Sometimes I’m not really sure if I’m dealing with sculpture or painting.”
Despite his love for certain School of London artists, Bowie stated that there were only “two or three pieces” by Bacon that he found “extraordinary”. Similarly, with Freud, he noted admiration for “the trickery of his work, the cankerous skin, which is nice and grungy” but didn’t “buy into him being the greatest painter that we have”. However, Bowie explained: “I’ve always been a huge David Bomberg fan. I love that particular school. There’s something very parochial English about it. But I don’t care. I like [Leon] Kossoff for the same reason”. Auerbach and Kossoff both studied under Bomberg in the late 1940s and early 1950s at Borough Polytechnic – now London South Bank University.
Bowie also cited an interest in the works of Damien Hirst, who he called “extremely emotional, subjective, very tied up with his own personal fears – his fear of death is very strong – and I find his pieces moving and not at all flippant.” Bowie credited Hirst as “one of the people who has helped to make art very accessible to the public in Britain in a way that has never really happened before, even at the height of the ’60s”. The two even worked together, with Hirst getting the singer to splatter paint on a spinning canvas, which reminded Bowie of “Picasso’s attitude”.
Finally, another favourite of Bowie’s was Jean-Michel Basquiat, even starring in the biographical drama Basquiat as Andy Warhol in 1996. Of his work, Bowie said: “I feel the very moment of his brush or crayon touching the canvas. There is a burning immediacy to his ever evaporating decisions that fires the imagination ten or 15 years on, as freshly molten as the day they were poured onto the canvas”.
Check out a slideshow of some of Bowie’s own artworks below.
