(Credits: Far Out / British Lion Films / Alamy)
Masterpiece is a word which is bandied around with far too much regularity in the art world, but the mark of a true masterpiece is a work which completely alters the cultural landscape forever, inspiring the next generation of creators.
It is fair to say, then, that both David Bowie’s Heroes and Iggy Pop’s The Idiot fit that bill.
Bowie and Pop were worlds apart during the early 1970s. While Pop was content to continue this confrontational brand of drug-fueled anarchy, fronting cult proto-punk heroes The Stooges, Bowie was riding high at the top of the singles chart, the poster boy of glam rock genius. When they came together, though, the pair seemed to have an unmatched rock and roll chemistry, elevating each other beyond the realms of thought both as artists and as people, too.
Their famed Berlin period, during which they were both trying and failing to get sober, is renowned for the wild antics the pair got up to in the German capital, but they managed to squeeze in some time for music, too. In fact, the products of their joint ventures were among the greatest works of their respective careers. For Bowie, records like Low and Heroes beautifully subverted expectations of him as a songwriter, marking his arguable creative peak, while inaugural solo albums Lust for Life and The Idiot secured Pop’s legacy beyond the realm of The Stooges.
In turn, those masterpieces went on to spawn a wealth of subsequent masterpieces. The Idiot, for instance, almost single-handedly established the moody post-punk scene, impacting everybody from Joy Division to the Jesus and Mary Chain and essentially setting the standard for alternative music for the rest of the century. Similarly, Heroes offered a drastic alternative to the middle-of-the-road rock populating the mainstream at that time.
Those legendary albums weren’t merely plucked out of the ether in a haze of German hangovers, though. Both records took profound visual inspiration from another artistic masterpiece, albeit one of an entirely different medium, in the form of Erich Heckel’s 1917 painting Roquairol.
Exactly why that painting struck a chord with the pair is known only to the songwriters themselves (and, given the extent of their substance abuse at that time, even they may have forgotten in the years that followed). However, Berlin’s Brücke Museum has hosted a version of the work since the late 1960s, which likely answers the question of how they came across the work.
Either way, the painting – depicting a rather dour, ill-looking man in a suit against a beautifully pastoral backdrop of greenery and sunset – formed the basis for two of the most iconic album covers of all time in Heroes and The Idiot. On both covers, our respective musical masters emulate the angular posing of the figure in Heckel’s piece, although Bowie switched the suit for a leather jacket and both artists ditched the colourful backdrop for a moody black-and-white image.
Inadvertently, then, every masterpiece album that was spawned off the back of those legendary Berlin period records owes something to the pioneering expressionism of Erich Heckel, who tragically passed away in 1970 without ever witnessing his unlikely impact on the future of rock and roll.
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