Springsteen’s life now an open book – Bowie’s art collection goes on view in NY

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‘Born to Run’ (Simon & Schuster), by Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen’s life is now officially an open book.

The autobiography “Born to Run” takes readers on a riveting ride through the everyman rock star’s deeply lived existence.

Springsteen, who scrawled his story in longhand over seven years, begins with an exquisitely detailed child’s-eye view of his 1950s working-class neighborhood. He weaves an American Land tapestry populated with his colorful Irish-Italian family. Then come the musical musings:

* Young Bruce, “on fire” after seeing Elvis on TV, quickly chafed at “stupendously boring” music lessons. “I still can’t read music to this day”.

* Once, in his early band, the Castiles, “we were being spit on, literally, way before it was a punk badge of honor”.

* Mature Bruce worked to capitalize on his strengths while compensating for imperfect vocal tone.

* Among the bucket moments: realizing a “teenage daydream” while playing with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Springsteen’s California phase yielded picture-perfect landscape descriptions, though readers will spend more time hanging out in — no surprise — a different state.

Gauzy, dreamlike photos inside the covers depict a vanished era in Asbury Park, New Jersey, the hugely symbolic seaside city of Springsteen’s formative musical years. In one, a Ferris wheel stands proud behind the historic Palace Amusements building.

Readers may need to buckle up for parts of this 508-page spin. He contemplates some deeply personal topics as a way of providing context for his art.

Beloved

Springsteen, 67 — who had an integrated band back when that wasn’t always popular — reveals what he wishes he’d said after the beloved Big Man was subjected to a sickening racial slur. He also shares the heart-wrenching hospital scene when Clarence Clemons drew his last breath.

Then he candidly discusses his own harrowing health battles.

After scary surgery, he defied doctors’ orders and crowd-surfed in Australia.

Quitting his longtime antidepressants prompted crying jags: “‘Bambi’ tears … ‘Old Yeller’ tears. ‘Fried Green Tomatoes’ tears … ‘I can’t find my keys’” tears. He broke down at the beach and was comforted by “a kindly elderly woman walking her dog”.

“It would’ve been funny, except it wasn’t”.

His wife and new medication pulled him out of the mental abyss that his father had also known all too well.

The salted wounds are soothed with sweetness: snapshots of his Growin’ Up family, and the one he created with the musician Patti Scialfa .

With Scialfa’s guidance, he learned to reconnect amid the musician’s life: padding into the kitchen overnight to get milk for their littlest one, then tucking him in with a story; learning to make pancakes for their brood.

Over time, he realized that “a song will always be there for me”.

But “your children”, he says, “are here and gone”.

Hundreds of pieces of art collected by late rock legend David Bowie went on display Monday in New York ahead of an auction, including works by modern greats Jean-Michel Basquiat and Damien Hirst.

Bowie, who died in January from an undisclosed battle with cancer, avidly followed the art world but was discreet about his buying.

“His attitude to collecting represents his attitude on music-making — he’s not afraid to look at things outside the mainstream”, said Simon Hucker, senior specialist in modern and post-war British art at Sotheby’s which is running the auction.

Bowie, already a musical icon, in the 1990s served on the editorial board of the magazine Modern Painters where he would occasionally write articles.

“He would interview artists that he thought were good, but on the whole he was very private about his art collecting”, Hucker said.

“Whilst he used to go to auctions in the 1990s, later on he wouldn’t go. He would buy a little more quietly, more remotely”, he said.

The core of Bowie’s collection was 20th-century British painting but he also took an interest in contemporary African works and so-called outsider art, created by the mentally ill and other people outside traditionally defined art circles.

The piece in the auction that is expected to earn the most, at $3.3-$4.6 million, is “Air Power” by Basquiat, a graffiti-inspired canvas with abstract skeletal figures.

Basquiat had just started to gain international fame when he died in 1988 at age 27 from an overdose.

Bowie bought “Air Power” and another Basquiat painting shortly before the 1996 biopic “Basquiat”, in which the rocker played his early idol Andy Warhol.

Another work in the auction is a 1995 collaboration with Hirst, a circular kaleidescope with a burst of green and a pink center that resembles an orbit.

The painting is entitled “Beautiful, hallo space-boy”, an allusion to Bowie’s recurring musical character of Major Tom, the astronaut explorer with a checkered personal life.

Bowie’s collection also features a number of pieces by the Italian artist Ettore Sottsass, who brought a pop culture aesthetic to office furniture.

More than 350 items in total will go on auction on Nov 10 and 11 in London.

As well as New York, Sotheby’s is previewing the collection in London, Los Angeles and Hong Kong.

Sotheby’s said it had worked with Bowie’s estate for several months to put together the auction. (Agencies)

By Kiley Armstrong

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