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Musician, actor, icon — David Bowie was for almost 50 years one of the most recognised and revered artists in the world, his influence transcending music to shape the wider culture of our time. His life as an art collector, however, was something he kept almost entirely hidden from public view. Now, for the first time, this little-known side of Bowie will be fully revealed.
“Eclectic, unscripted, understated: David Bowie’s collection offers a unique insight into the personal world of one of the 20th century’s greatest creative spirits.” Oliver Barker, Chairman, Sotheby’s Europe.
Art was, seriously, the only thing I’d ever wanted to own.
It has always been for me a stable nourishment. I use it.
It can change the way I feel in the mornings. The same work
can change me in different ways, depending on what
I’m going through.DAVID BOWIE
#BowieCollector
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David Bowie’s Personal Art Collection to be Unveiled for the First Time
Important Paintings by 20th-Century Masters including Basquiat, Hirst and Auerbach to Lead a Major 10-Day
Exhibition and Auction at Sotheby’s in London
quoted in The New York Times, 1998
In November this year, Sotheby’s will stage Bowie/Collector – a three-part sale that includes a selection of around 400 items from the private collection of David Bowie. At its heart will be Bowie’s collection of Modern and Contemporary British art – a richly stimulating group of over 200 works by many of the most important British artists of the 20th century, including Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Frank Auerbach and Damien Hirst. Bowie’s famously inquisitive mind also led him to Outsider Art, Surrealism, Contemporary African art and, not least, to the work of the eccentric Italian designer Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis group. This is a collection put together with great thoughtfulness on the basis not of reputation but of Bowie’s highly personal, intellectual response to each artist’s individual vision.
From 1–10 November, Bowie’s private collection will be exhibited at Sotheby’s New Bond Street galleries in London, giving fans, art historians and collectors a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to immerse themselves in the art and objects that informed his private world.
The landmark November exhibition will be preceded by a series of previews around the world, starting with a three-week exhibition of selected works in London this summer, from 20 July until 9 August. Further exhibitions will follow in Los Angeles, New York and Hong Kong. The sale catalogue will be available in early October. Register for a copy here or visit: sothebys.com/BowieCollector
A spokesperson for the Estate of David Bowie said, “David’s art collection was fuelled by personal interest and compiled out of passion. He always sought and encouraged loans from the collection and enjoyed sharing the works in his custody. Though his family are keeping certain pieces of particular personal significance, it is now time to give others the opportunity to appreciate – and acquire – the art and objects he so admired.”
#BowieCollector
The only thing I buy addictively is art.
DAVID BOWIE
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Preview World Tour:
London: 20 July-9 August Los Angeles: 20-21 September New York: 26-29 September Hong Kong: 12-15 October
The Exhibition:
Bowie/Collector: 1–10 November, Sotheby’s New Bond Street London
The Auctions:
Part I: Modern & Contemporary Art, Evening Auction, 10 November
Part II: Modern & Contemporary Art, Day Auction, 11 November
Part III: Post-Modernist Design: Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis Group, 11 November
For further information, please visit: sothebys.com/BowieCollector
Bowie & the Art World The depth of Bowie’s engagement with the art world cannot be overemphasised. He was an artist, critic, patron, publisher, curator and magazine editor, with London – and Modern British art – at the heart of this passion. In 1994 – in a characteristically unorthodox move for a rock superstar – he joined an invitation-only academic coterie on the editorial board of Modern Painters magazine, for which he interviewed the likes of Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. In 1998, he launched the art-book publishing company 21 alongside Karen Wright, then editor of Modern Painters, the gallerist Bernard Jacobson and Sir Timothy Sainsbury. His time at 21 is best remembered for perhaps the most infamous hoax in recent art history, when Bowie hosted an elaborate party at Jeff Koons’ Manhattan studio for the launch of a book celebrating the life and work of a mysterious artist named Nat Tate, a wholly fictional creation of his friend, the novelist William Boyd.
Bowie painted throughout his life and was immersed in the artistic communities not only of London, but also of New York and Berlin. He first met Andy Warhol at the legendary ‘Factory’ studio in New York in 1971; and was critically acclaimed for his portrayal of the American Pop pioneer in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 biopic, Basquiat.
The Collection in Focus Simon Hucker, Senior Specialist in Modern & Post-War British Art at Sotheby’s, said: “As a collector, Bowie looked for artists with whom he felt some connection, and for works that had the power to move or inspire him. This is what led him to British art of the early and mid-20th century in particular, which, of course, also led him home.”
Born and raised in South London, it is perhaps no surprise that Bowie was drawn to chroniclers of the capital’s streets such as Harold Gilman, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, whose tutor and inspiration, David Bomberg, Bowie also collected in depth. Away from the city, the British landscape was also a constant source of fascination for Bowie, represented here by the St Ives school and later post-war and contemporary painters such as Ivon Hitchens and John Virtue.
Bowie’s collecting was by no means limited to British art: from early century pioneers such as Marcel Duchamp to Jean-Michel Basquiat (represented in the summer London preview by his 1984 masterpiece Air Power), to Contemporary African art and ‘Outsider’ artists from the Gugging Institute in Vienna, the collection is truly breathtaking in its
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I’ve always found that I collect. I’m
a collector. I always just seemed to collect
personalities, ideas…DAVID BOWIE
scope, encompassing paintings, drawings, sculpture, prints and photographs. Set to be unveiled in its entirety in the coming weeks and months, it reveals a collector of far-reaching interests, intellectual rigour and subtle vision.
Bowie was also a voracious collector of the work of Ettore Sottsass and his revolutionary Memphis Design group.
Cécile Verdier, Co-Head of 20th Century Design at Sotheby’s, said: “The works produced by the historical avant-garde design collaborative Memphis Milano, led by Ettore Sottsass, could not have found a more receptive and tuned-in audience than David Bowie. This is design with no limits and no boundaries. When you look at a piece of Memphis design, you see their unconventionality, the kaleidoscope of forms and patterns; the vibrant contrasting colours that really shouldn’t work but really do.”
A Glimpse inside the Collection
Auerbach“My God, yeah! I want to sound like that looks” – David Bowie on Frank Auerbach’s work, quoted in the New York Times, 1998.
Bowie loved the rich, sculptural effects of Auerbach’s paintings (“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”), and clearly felt a deep affinity with the artist, whose work could provoke in him a whole gamut of reactions: “It will give spiritual weight to my angst. Some mornings I’ll look at it and go, “Oh, God, yeah! I know!’’ 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.” [Ibid]
Head of Gerda Boehm, a portrait of the artist’s cousin, was last exhibited at the Royal Academy, when Bowie lent the work to Auerbach’s much-heralded retrospective in 2001.
Frank Auerbach Head of Gerda Boehm, 1965
Oil on board£300,000-500,000
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GilmanHarold Gilman’s painting, an essay in stillness, of the remains of the day, appears at first glance to be anything but revolutionary. But in the context of British art in the early 20th century, it is, in its own quiet and covert way, very radical.
This was a new kind of subject, a suburban lodger and part-time charlady, lost in thought in a nondescript room in an ordinary London house. For art to be modern, artists like Gilman demanded that it should be concerned with the everyday life of the city, with the peripheral and unseen, with the working classes.
All of this must not have been lost on Bowie, a boy born in Brixton just after the Second World War, when much of London’s housing stock was still as it was in the early part of the century – grand Georgian houses subdivided into flats and bedsits, with tall thin sash windows, linoleum floors and a stove for heat.
LanyonWitness is one of three works by Peter Lanyon that Bowie loaned to the artist’s retrospective at Tate St Ives in 2010. Lanyon painted Witness two years after he had first taken to the skies in a glider. This new activity allowed him to see the Cornish landscape from a radically different perspective and to bring bigger, more elemental forces into his painting, becoming “like the mountaineer who cannot see the clouds without feeling the lift inside them.” This is a painting of American scale and ambition, painted in a converted sail-loft in a small fishing town on the western-most tip of England.
Harold GilmanInterior (Mrs Mounter), 1917
Oil on canvas£150,000-250,000
Peter LanyonWitness, 1961Oil on canvas
£250,000-350,000
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Basquiat“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 fifteen years on, as freshly molten as the day they were poured onto the canvas” – David Bowie on Basquiat, Modern Painters, 1996.
The Bowie-Basquiat connection is best known through the lens of Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film Basquiat, in which David played the role of the young artist’s mentor and collaborator, Andy Warhol. Air Power was acquired by Bowie the following year.
“It comes as no surprise to learn that he [Basquiat] had a not-so-hidden ambition to be a rock musician, as his work relates to rock in ways that very few other visual artists get near.” – David Bowie on Basquiat, Modern Painters, 1996.
HirstBursting with a magnificently dynamic energy in its pulsating kaleidoscope of reds, greens, blues and yellows, this is a vibrant and powerful example of Damien Hirst’s trademark ‘spin’ paintings. Hirst was one of only a handful of high-profile contemporary artists for whom Bowie publicly expressed his admiration, interviewing the ‘Young British Artist’ for Modern Painters in 1995. “He’s different. I think his work is 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”, said Bowie in an interview with the New York Times.
Jean-Michel BasquiatAir Power, 1984
Acrylic and oilstick on canvas£2.5-3.5m
Damien HirstBeautiful, Shattering, Slashing, Violent,
Pinky, Hacking, Sphincter Painting, 1995Household gloss on canvas
£250,000-350,000
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My idea of a contemporary artist
is Damien Hirst.DAVID BOWIE
HazouméBeninese artist Romuald Hazoumé is probably best known for his sculptural assemblages of commonplace found objects, such as Alexandra. Much like Marcel Duchamp and his ‘Readymades’, Hazoumé appropriates familiar objects and reconfigures them, creating a dialogue between art history and the history of colonialism in Africa, as well as contemporary African politics, especially those surrounding oil.
Alexandra is indicative of Bowie’s far-reaching collecting interests, as well as his love of works with multiple layers of meaning and a sense of mischief and play. Bowie’s approach to contemporary African art – as with all other elements of the collection – was marked by a deep intellectual rigour, exemplified by his five-page review of the inaugural Johannesburg Biennale for Modern Painters in 1995.
SottsassBreaking with the minimalist aesthetic that characterised furniture design in the 1970s, Ettore Sottsass and the Milan-based Memphis group revolutionised cutting-edge design, introducing fun, humour and strikingly bold colour combinations. The ‘Casablanca’ Sideboard, from the first Memphis collection in 1981, is considered a defining work of Post-Modern design, with examples held in numerous major museum collections around the world including the V&A in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museo dei Mobile e delle Sculture Lignee, Milan.
Romuald Hazoumé Alexandra, 1995Found objects£5,000-£7,000
Ettore Sottsass‘Casablanca’ Sideboard, 1981
£4,000-6,000
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CastiglioniIt perhaps comes as no surprise to discover that the most innovative and daring musician of his generation listened to music on such an unconventional record player. Created by brothers Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni for Brionvega, this playful stereo cabinet is a definitive piece of 1960s Italian design, with examples in the permanent collections of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York and the V&A in London.Pier Giacomo and Achille Castiglioni
Brionvega Radiophonograph, model no RR 126, 1965£800-1,200
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ENQUIRIES
London +44 (0)20 7293 6000 Mitzi Mina [email protected] Toby Skeggs [email protected] Rosie Chester [email protected]
New York +1 212 606 7176 Lauren Gioia [email protected] Darrell Rocha [email protected]
Hong Kong +852 2822 8129 Winnie Tang [email protected]
Further information on all aspects of the collection will be made available in the coming months.
