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Before he became an alternative star and contemporary icon, David Bowie was a painter. He is remembered today as a gender-fluid chameleon who crushed genres and cultural norms through his music, but the seed for his creativity was born in an art studio at Bromley School of Art in southeast London.
During his lifetime, Bowie expressed how much art inspired his music. Art-making for him didn’t just take the form of composing songs but also composing on a canvas. The two mediums worked hand-in-hand throughout his glorious career. Most Bowie fans will know that he painted the self-portrait on the cover of his album Outside. While living in Berlin, he was so inspired by the German Expressionist movement that it became a central element, not just in his lithographs and portraits—which screamed bold colours and haunting images—but also in his fashion.
Being a talented mastermind in two artistic fields has always meant that one is viewed more amatorially than the other. But this was never the case for Bowie. His art was far from a personal passion project he occasionally thought to dabble in; rather, it draped galleries in Cork Street and Basel. “Art was, seriously, the only thing I’d ever wanted to own. It has always been for me a stable nourishment”, he once said.
Throughout the years, Bowie also built an incredible collection of artwork. His approach was never to just buy a piece for the sake of it; instead, he really immersed himself in it and built a relationship with it. His exquisite artistic judgement no doubt came from his work as an art critic, writing for Modern Painters magazine and interviewing many contemporary artists in the process.
His taste had no limits. The 400 pieces he owned extended across multiple disciplines, mediums, styles and origins. His African mixed media pieces were just as valuable as his Rubens canvases. He saw the value and potential in both well-established artists and emerging ones.
Buying art meant that Bowie built bonds with the artists who made them, primarily Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who became great friends. Warhol had quite a grasp on Bowie’s musical genius; after having watched his play Pork in London, Bowie was inspired to write a song titled ‘Andy Warhol’ for his fourth album Hunky Dory.
One of Bowie’s most prized possessions was the painting Air Power by Basquiat, which features portraits of Basquiat himself and Bowie. It is a big canvas splashed with bold colours and primitive, cubist objects and figures. The pair’s connection endured right until Basquiat’s untimely death in 1988. On the other hand, Bowie played Warhol in the 1996 American biographical drama film Basquiat, directed by Julian Schnabel, a challenge that only someone who knew the artists well would undertake.
A year after Basquiat tragically died from a drug overdose, Air Power sold for just $350,900 at Christie’s New York. Since then, it has been sold another two times, garnering a whopping £7.1million in 1984, the last time it was sold.
Bowie never stopped art collecting, even while he secretly battled cancer. His collection became one of the most famous ones when a large part of it was up for sale in 2016 at Sotheby’s. It made more than double the pre-sale estimates, drawing thousands of bidders worldwide and totalling around £33m.
The auction underscored not only Bowie’s discerning taste and limitless passion for all kinds of art but also offered a glimpse into a slightly more private fragment of his illustrious life, revealing an erudite intellectual whose genius went far beyond his evocative music career.
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