ART, DAVID BOWIE once told the New York Times, ‘has always been for me a stable nourishment.’ You don’t think of stability with the Thin White Duke, locked in a room in Los Angeles or Berlin, the blinds pulled down, living off cocaine and frightening himself half to death with forays into black magic. But art permeated everything he ever did, a source of succour and reliable inspiration, one of the few constants in his restless life.
The only O-level he got was art, and like many glam rockers and proto punks he did the obligatory stint at art school too. He didn’t stick around, abandoning Croydon College in the early 1960s in favour of making stabs at rock stardom. When that didn’t seem to work he backed away from music altogether, spending a couple of years studying and performing with his lover, the visionary mime artist Lindsay Kemp. It was Kemp who introduced him to some of his most lasting influences, including kabuki theatre, and who helped him develop a captivatingly visual, physical dimension to his songs, bringing high art to bear on the disposable medium of pop.
After the release of Hunky Dory in the summer of 1971, he went to visit another hero: Andy Warhol, the consummate magician of the twentieth century. Among the things Bowie got from Warhol were his permissive, prodigal mixing of high and low culture and his thrifty willingness to snatch inspiration from anywhere. Bowie turned up at the Factory in white Oxford bags and Mary Janes, a slouchy bibbety-bobbity hat pulled low over his long blonde hair. He sang his homage ‘Andy Warhol’ to the master (‘Tie him up when he’s fast asleep, Send him on a pleasant cruise’), who was reportedly not wholly flattered. Then he performed an earnest mime for a nonplussed Andy, in which he opened up his heart and let his guts spill on the floor, the antithesis of affectless Factory style.
It was prophetic, perhaps, of what was to come: the annihilating effects of serious, cult-level fame; the sense of being haunted by his own creations, of careering with them into places inimical to physical and mental health. Bowie was always willing to risk ridicule and failure, to expose himself, to go further out than anyone else might have thought possible or wise. Album after album wore its influences on its sleeve, the avant-garde German expressionism of Heroes or Low, the Chatterton-meets-Beau Brummell lushness of The Man Who Sold the World.
Like many rock stars, he started collecting art, including a pair of Tintorettos, a Rubens and a Frank Auerbach. But at some point in the 1980s he began making it too. He’d got himself stuck creatively, and as a way of edging out of the doldrums he switched mediums, using painting as a way of swimming back to himself. At first it was a private business, a respite and release from music, and then a fertile way of solving problems and nudging around blocks.
Always courageous in his reinventions, he made this aspect of his life public in 1994, when he first exhibited his expressionistic, interestingly static and melancholy paintings at the Flowers East Gallery in London for his friend and collaborator Brian Eno’s charity War Child. By this time, he was already part of the art establishment. He was on the board of the magazine Modern Painters, where at an early meeting he’d shyly suggested that he might interview the painter Balthus, then a neighbour in Switzerland. This was followed by serious, knowledgeable interviews with other contemporary artists, among them Tracey Emin, Roy Lichtenstein and Julian Schnabel. In 1997 he played Warhol in Julian Schnabel’s film Basquiat. Much is made of Bowie’s inability to act, but there’s something almost eerie about how well he embodies Andy, with his weird spacy intonation and awkward grace. It’s a loving homage, circling him back to his own youthful ambitions.
He never stopped collaborating, never stopped travelling between mediums. One of his last great songs was ‘Where Are We Now?’, a plaintive hymn to ageing, to abiding loss and abiding love. The video, made by Tony Oursler, is set in an artist’s studio, that site of rigorous and messy transformation, Bowie’s psychic home throughout the years. ‘As long as there’s me,’ he sings, his face lined and sorrowful, still dignified though it is projected ridiculously onto a puppet. ‘As long as there’s you.’
I’ve kept a picture of him on my desktop for years, a screenshot of two frames from Nicholas Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. It was the quintessential Bowie story, the one he kept telling: an alien traveller, trapped on earth or lost in space, the only one of his kind, lonely and magnetic. In the first frame he’s lying on a bed, head propped on one skinny arm, a strand of auburn hair falling across his bony, feline face. ‘What do you do?’ the subtitle asks. ‘For a living, I mean.’ In the second frame his head is down, pillowed on his arm, and he is smiling to himself. Oh, I’m just visiting.