David Bowie’s unlikely love for Frank Auerbach

In true avant-garde rock tradition, David Bowie had gone to art school before becoming the Starman who took over the airwaves. His love of art is well-established and primarily evident in his ever-changing aesthetic, which saw him blend the visual world with the sonic. Outside of his prolific music career, he collected and produced art, developing a fascination with outsider artists that often touched his sound.

In 1998, he admitted that art gave him a sense of stability, saying: “Art was, seriously, the only thing I’d ever wanted to own.” It had immense power over him, dictating his morning mood and nourishing his soul. “The same work can change me in different ways, depending on what I’m going through,” he told the New York Times.

“For instance, somebody I like very much indeed is Frank Auerbach,” he continued. “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.”

Auerbach’s work is often said to have this effect on viewers, compared to Lucian Freud – who Bowie noted didn’t live up to his reputation as the “greatest” contemporary painter – and Francis Bacon. His portraits are expressionist, the paint laid on so thick his subjects are barely recognisable as faces.

That ambiguity and frenzied painting style gave “spiritual weight” to Bowie’s 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. I can look at it and say: ‘My God, yeah! I want to sound like that looks.'”

To that end, Bowie discussed his part in the glam rock generation, who famously didn’t see a divide between audio and visual art, joking that in the mid-60s, there was a running joke that if you wanted to become a skilled rhythm and blues player, you went to art school. “You know, 25 years ago, there were a whole crop of us that tried to drag all the arts together and create this potpourri, a kind of new essence for English music,” he mused.

He recalled conversations at art school and how the avante-garde artists always dominated discussion. For his part, he was drawn to Expressionists and remembered “an awful lot of Dada” popping up too. The love of boundary-pushing art followed him into his music career. However, he never considered the two as separate forces – it was that the passionate response art stirred in him was something to be continued in his music.

“I always want a certain abstraction,” he explained. “Art should be open enough for me to develop my own dialogue with it.”