Who can I be now? Pictures that inspired Bowie…

By way of a coming attraction, I recently conducted an interview with Glenn Hendler, who wrote the 33 1/3 book about Diamond Dogs. Glenn manages to pack an enormous amount of information into a pretty small book and the interview is terrific. Despite listening to Diamond Dogs for years, I learned things I didn’t previously know from Glenn’s book. For instance, I didn’t know that Bowie’s pose on the cover was partially inspired by a photo of Josephine Baker, which you can see above. We aren’t 100% sure it was precisely this picture, and also I flipped it around to better demonstrate the similarity to the record cover. But this, to me, falls into the category of “how about that?”

While I didn’t know about the Josephine Baker picture, there are other instances of Bowie striking a pose based on other images. Perhaps the most striking example is of Bowie borrowing from Marlene Dietrich to create a look for the cover of Hunky Dory . Bowie looked forward to actually acting alongside Dietrich in Just A Gigolo, but was disappointed when she filmed her scenes in an entirely different location (they appear to be in the same room in the movie, but that’s just a cinematic trick— Bowie never got to meet her).

Meanwhile, I have often read that Bowie’s look on the version of The Man Who Sold the World cover in which he is reclining in a dress was based on someone like Veronica Lake or Lauren Bacall. And while I think that’s correct, I recently came across this by none other than Steve Pafford who noted, “In April 1971, the UK’s Daily Mirror ran a piece on the cover of Bowie’s latest album, The Man Who Sold The World. In a thinly-veiled parody of a painting he claimed was by pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the singer’s slim, languid frame was pictured in repose on a chaise longue that had been draped in blue velvet. His mousy blond hair was long and peek-a-boo style like Hollywood starlet Veronica Lake. Most spectacular of all, he was wearing what he called his ‘man’s dress’” (click on Steve’s name to link to his original post).

The point being here that I knew about Lake and Bacall, but not about the old painting. Again, I flipped the image around to emphasize the similarities, and again, how about that?

Bowie was not simply inspired by women. He posed like occultist Aleister Crowley (click HERE for a story on that, including side-by-side images). I recently read an article about the androgynous artist and activist Claude Cahun (click to link) that contained several pictures that Bowie may have taken inspiration from (or maybe it was just Claude’s style). Bowie dressed as Buster Keaton for the “Miracle Goodnight” (1993) video (though not much of that footage was used) and looked to Keaton for his presentation in the video for “Be My Wife” (1977). Bowie’s pose on the “Heroes” cover (as well as Iggy Pop’s The Idiot cover) was inspired by the 1917 painting Roquairol by German Expressionist Erich Heckel (click HERE). The cover of hours… is modeled after Michelangelo’s Pietà. There are actually many other examples.

So what was Bowie up to? Well, I never had the chance to ask him, so I don’t know for sure. But to begin with, this kind of thing wasn’t, and isn’t all that unusual. Queen also based an album cover on a Marlene Dietrich picture, see HERE). And Bowie himself would serve to inspire those who came after.

I suspect that Bowie was paying homage. He clearly wasn’t pretending not to look like Buster Keaton. I suspect he thought it was daring to obviously look like Marlene Dietrich and Aleister Crowley. Considering when he posed like them, it is likely they were all better known at the time than they are today. The Josephine Baker (or, for that matter the Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting) is a little different. Maybe the Steve Pafford recognized the painting right away, but I just don’t think it’s that famous. And, though Glenn Hendler knows that Bowie modeled himself after a photo of Baker, he wasn’t sure exactly which picture. So in these cases I think Bowie recognized something that was captured in the original pictures. Baker, as Hendler pointed out, assumes feline-like qualities in her picture. Bowie was going for dog, but in this case it isn’t so much that he’s trying to look like Baker as it is that he’s trying to tap into the same primal essence that she found.

In any case, the “magpie” nickname for Bowie is probably closer to the mark than the more common “chameleon” label that he rejected. Bowie freely borrowed from others in all sorts of ways. This isn’t even a profound observation. But admit it, isn’t seeing the Baker picture side-by-side with the Diamond Dogs cover cool?