Bowie and Artist Peter Howson

I’m currently reading Alexander Larman’s excellent book, Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie, which is basically a biography of Bowie starting around the Tin Machine period. I’ll address the book as a whole later, so stay tuned for that. But there are plenty of anecdotes in the book that I didn’t know about, one of which had to do with his role as an art collector and critic, and his interaction with artist Peter Howson.

Larman explains that Howson, who was the official war artist of the Bosnian War, produced a number of shocking and controversial works, the most discussed of which was his painting Croatian and Muslim, a 1994 picture that depicted a woman being brutally raped by two jeering men.

Bowie purchased the painting after it “was originally commissioned by the Imperial War Museum, who balked at the work and refused to display it, despite including it in their catalogue of Howson’s work.” Larman quotes Bowie explaining, “it’s a great picture [and] I think it’s ridiculous that it wasn’t shown . . . I don’t like it. I think that is a completely inappropriate word, but I do think it’s very powerful, and, obviously, very important.”

So, that’s interesting. But what I found really interesting was mentioned almost as an aside — “An artistic bond formed between Bowie and Howson, which resulted in the artist painting several studies of the musician.”

I don’t pretend to be an expert on visual art, and admittedly I was not familiar with Howson’s name before reading this anecdote, but I was surprised to learn that he sketched Bowie. I’ve featured art depicting Bowie by plenty of significant artists, so that in itself isn’t surprising. But I take it that Bowie was not typical of Howson’s subject matter and, in any case, that these pictures existed seemed like the kind of thing I should have already known.

On top of that, Larman relayed another funny — nearly shocking — story about what happened when Bowie came to Howson’s studio to pose. Larman quotes Howson: “I asked him to pose for me so he said ‘Fine.’ He took off his coat and I put him on a plinth and he fell asleep. He fell asleep as he was posing, fell off the plinth and ripped his shirt. It was quite a weird feeling to have Bowie, this godlike creature, lying on the floor.”

As for the controversial painting Bowie purchased, Larman reports that it sold after Bowie’s death for £130,000, ten times the amount of the highest estimate.