Elton John Wants to Open a Museum for His Art Collection, and 6 Other Takeaways From His Revealing New Memoir

Elton
John wants to stage a huge exhibition about his colorful career and
possibly open a private museum to house his vast art collection,
according to his candid new autobiography, Me. The
singer-songwriter has plenty to show and tell. The performer has
been collecting art, with a particular focus on photography, for
the past three decades. 

Details about the museum remain minimal, and a
spokesperson did not immediately return a request to provide more
details. But at the end of the book, John lists all the things he
wants to do after his farewell world tour, including working with
his AIDS foundation, launching an exhibition dedicated to his
entire career, and possibly “opening a permanent museum, so people
can see some of my art and photography.”

There
are many other revelations in the warts-and-all account of his
career so far, published last month and authored with the help of
music journalist Alexis Petridis. In the book, John recounts how
collecting things has always made him happy, even when carried out
to excess.

Below,
we delve into the tome’s biggest revelations about John’s
relationship to art. 

1. Elton John ignored Andy Warhol when he was on a
bender with John Lennon. 

John
recounts a night in 1973 or 74 (dates get a bit hazy) when Andy
Warhol came knocking on his hotel door in New York. The musician
was holed up in a suite with John Lennon at a time when the Beatle
and his artist companion, Yoko Ono, were temporarily separated. The
two Brits were midway through a pile of cocaine when there was a
knock at the door. They feared it might be the police. Peeking
through the keyhole, John recognized Warhol, standing in the
doorway with his constant companion, a Polaroid camera. John was
about to let Warhol in, but Lennon “shook his head frantically” and
hissed, “Don’t answer it.” Lennon did not like the idea of being
photographed with “icicles” of coke hanging off his nose, even by
Warhol, a past master in flattering celebrities. And so the pop
stars ignored the continued knocking of the world’s most famous Pop
artist.

2. John’s passion for art took off after he got out of
rehab.

John
has no regrets about his shopaholic tendencies, especially since he
gave up other graver vices first. “I’ve been addicted to far more
damaging things than buying tableware and photographs,” he writes
(although he admits that owning 1,000 candles and keeping them in a
closet is a bit excessive).

After
entering rehab and getting sober, John took time off from
performing in the early 1990s. That’s when he started collecting
photography. “I’d been around incredible photographers for most of
my career—Terry O’Neill, Annie Leibovitz, Richard
Avedon, Norman Parkinson—but I just thought of it as a form of
publicity, never an art,” he writes. That all changed when he
looked over the shoulder of a friend who was thinking about buying
some prints by Herb Ritts, who had shot one of John’s album covers
in the past. “I ended up buying 12 of them,” he
recalls. 

3. John’s collecting eventually became so excessive, it
took over his house. 

John’s
art collecting eventually reached an epic scale. “It was the state
of the squash court that made me realize my passion for collecting
had got the tiniest bit out of proportion,” he recalls. No one
could play because his home court was full of crates. And he
couldn’t unpack anything because there was no extra space in his
mansion near Windsor outside of London. Moving around the house was
an obstacle course, he confesses. 

4. His love for Man Ray goes back a long
way. 

John has built a particularly
strong collection of Man Ray photographs—and his love affair with
the artist dates back to the 1960s, well before he began collecting
photography, and even before he became Elton John. Then known as
Reginald Dwight, the musician and his writing partner Bernie Taupin
were struggling artists living in Dwight’s mother’s house in
Pinner, an unglamorous suburb of London. John had no money, but he
had reproductions of Man Ray on the wall, which he had loved since
a teenager. Years later, he bought a vintage print of May
Ray’s Glass
Tears (1932). The
£112,000 he paid at Sotheby’s in 1993 set a
new auction record for a  photograph at the
time. 

5. His acquisitiveness even
scared Sotheby’s specialists.

In an
effort to downsize his bursting collection, Johns sent many of his
possessions to Sotheby’s for a four-day auction in 1988 that ended
up generating more than $8 million. Sotheby’s experts left John’s
home “looking a little faint,” he recalls. He was not quite sure
whether it was because of the quantity “or the sheer hideousness of
some of it.” He ended up
selling all his paintings except a small handful, including a
Francis Bacon, a Patrick Proctor, and two
Magrittes. 

6. He and his husband want to give some of it
away.

John
and his husband David Furnish are also generous museum patrons.
There is now a photography gallery in their name at London’s
Victoria and Albert Museum, which is due to host a show drawing on
their 7,000-work photography collection, details of which are yet
to be announced. It is a follow-up to the show of John’s modern
photography at Tate Modern, “The Radical Eye,” in
2016.   

John
and Furnish were among the UK’s first gay couples to become civil
partners, and in his autobiography, the singer reveals that they originally planned to
hold a lavish wedding reception at a studio on the Pinewood film
lot outside London. But “the planner came back with a budget that
even I thought was ridiculous,” the high-spending musician recalls.
“I remember looking at it and thinking: ‘I could go mad in the Old
Masters department of Sotheby’s for that kind of
money.’” 

The post Elton John Wants to Open a Museum for His Art
Collection, and 6 Other Takeaways From His Revealing New Memoir
appeared first on artnet News.