The David Bowie center opens its doors in London on Saturday, September 13. Installed in the Victoria and Albert Museum warehouse (V&A), the new antenna of this prestigious exhibition center gives a place to the 90,000 pieces of the singer’s personal archives, disappeared in 2016.
Among them, costumes, handwritten words, scores and photos … but also precious missives documented the years in which the musician tried to enter.
“I don’t think I could have supported all the setbacks he suffered and continue smiling, full of confidence and struggle,” his father, Haywood Jones, wrote in a letter addressed to a company where Bowie hoped to work.
Another, dated July 1968 and sent by the Apple Records seal to the artist’s entourage, attests to the rejections he annihilated in his early days. “We do not believe that he (David Bowie, note of the editor) corresponds to what we are currently looking for,” he writes in particular.
A letter from Lady Gaga
The center also documents the lasting influence of the interpreter of Let’s dance In the artists who succeeded. To do this, he reveals a letter from the American pop star Lady Gaga: “I have the impression that my whole career was an artistic attempt to notice,” he wrote in his letter.
In total, only 200 objects are exposed to the public, but visitors have the possibility of consulting, at the request, other pieces maintained in the reserves. Among them, the key to the Berlin apartment that Bowie shared with Iggy Pop at the end of the 1970s.
Other documents reveal failed projects, including an adaptation of the novel 1984 By George Orwell. The artist also planned to organize a musical inspired by the London of the 18th century.
The costumes of the scene of the characters “Duke Blanco Delgado” or “Ziggy Stardust”, guitars or even fans complement this immersion in the artist’s world.
“We had the opportunity to receive these files in a particularly well structured state,” said Sabrina Offord, from V&A. Since the 1990s, he explained to AFP, the artist “sent objects to his team with notes about the context and his vision of his place in his work.”
Source: BFM TV
