"David really felt that Britain was the center of the art world," says the artist Julian Schnabel about his friend, David Bowie, whom he directed in the film Basquiat and whose art collection will hit the auction block at Sotheby's in London beginning this Thursday. "The fact is that art doesn't know any boundaries, and David certainly epitomized that because he was interested in and drew inspiration from all types of art."
Bowie's legend has only grown in the months since his death at 69 on 10 January. But while most assessments have focused on Bowie's music and, occasionally, his acting, the Sotheby's sale gives us another, unexpected window into the icon's mind, offering not only a peak into the art from which Bowie drew inspiration but also that which spoke so strongly to him that he spent millions collecting it.
"David was very serious about art, and especially Modern British Art," Bowie's friend and art dealer, Bernard Jacobson, says of the man whom, he recalls, reveled in his role as board member and contributor to the magazine Modern Painters, something that even his most diehard fans know nothing about. "We would talk for hours and debate what it all meant. He was full of ideas and questions. But he was also compulsive about collecting. He just couldn't get enough of it, which was amazing. This was the David Bowie. I mean, could you imagine walking down the street talking about serious art with Elvis Presley? Can you imagine Elvis Presley spending an afternoon in the National Gallery?"
The Sotheby's sale, which was previewed with exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and now London, includes 400 pieces chosen by Bowie's family from his vast collection. At the heart of the sale are more than 200 works by many of the most important British artists of the 20th Century, including Damien Hirst, William Tillyer, Frank Auerbach, Harold Gilman, Peter Lanyon, Henry Moore, and Graham Sutherland.
"It's a remarkable collection, and it's an eclectic collection," says Frances Christie, the Senior Director of Sotheby's Modern and Post-War British Art department. "It gives you a different insight into his creative mind. People aren't very aware of this aspect of David Bowie's life, but his interest in art was certainly known in the art world in London in the 1990s. And I think what he collected really gives a window into how intellectual he was as a collector. He was definitely drawn to things that had personal meaning to him. The artists he collected are those very serious British artists who were always at the cutting edge of their time, but they're not automatically what you might think this major, cultural icon would've collected. Instead, he was interested in what spoke to him in a visceral way."
Interestingly, the bulk of the pieces on auction were purchased in the early 1990s, at a time when Bowie's stock was at a relatively low ebb. He'd hit commercial gold in the early 1980s with his album Let's Dance, and had made a killing on several tours that decade, but his albums Tonight and Never Let Me Down, as well as his foray into alt-rock with the group Tin Machine, were met with jeers from critics as well as many of the fans he'd made at the height of his fame. The works he collected during the period, like Lanyon's Witness and Auerbach's Head of Gerde Boehm, are striking and intellectually demanding, and must have given Bowie the artistic boost he needed. In 1995 he released a remarkable collaboration with his old pal Brian Eno, 1.Outside, and a string of excellent albums and tours followed, before heart problems caused him to withdraw in 2004.
"Outside felt like a rebirth," recalls Mike Garson, who played piano for Bowie for over 40 years. "David was always looking for inspiration, and it makes sense he would find it in the art that he loved. But I've never met anyone who was able to synthesize what inspired him in quite the same way. It was remarkable, and the inspiration wasn't limited to his music. During the Outside sessions, he did portraits of all of us in the band. I still have one he did of me hanging in my home."
"Clearly collecting was one of the avenues with which he explored his creativity," Christie says. "And the fact that he chose the artists he did and that he put together the collection he did actually shows how intellectual he was. He wasn't just buying randomly. His collection has a real thread of narrative. For me, that tells me a lot about how he must've approached all of his other creative outlets. If he collected with such intellect, it makes me think he must've come to music, his own art, or any statement really, with the same amount of thoughtfulness."
Christie also says that, unlike many of his newly flush, rock star friends, Bowie didn't buy works by the big names—Picasso, de Kooning, Magritte, Warhol—that you'd typically expect someone like him to collect. Rather, she says, it's an astonishing collection with an incredible narrative thread, which tells the story of 20th Century British art.
"I think that's really special because it's not always like that," she says, admiringly. "Clearly collecting was one of the avenues with which he explored his creativity."
