New book paints illuminating portrait of Davie Bowie

It’s a portrait of a man who was a portrait incarnate, really, a human art project whose very being served as a canvas for his creations.

David Bowie was indivisible from his art in a way that few musicians have ever been, as reaffirmed by the new book “A Portrait of Bowie,” (Cassell, $35). It is a gorgeous compendium of iconic images of Bowie over the years as well as chapter-length remembrances from numerous collaborators and contemporaries.

“Ultimately Bowie was a conceptual artist,” notes Martyn Ware, founder of Brit synth-pop act Human League. “It just so happens that the media he used were rock ’n’ roll, identity, the way he dressed — he even did theater and film, of course. The way he approached his work, it was like he was using an album as a medium to paint on.”

Bowie’s music — which was as malleable and shape-shifting from album to album as the goo in a lava lamp — was visual as it was sonic.

To underscore this point, producer and songwriter extraordinaire Nile Rodgers shares an anecdote about how Bowie showed up at his apartment one day as the two were preparing to make “Let’s Dance,” Bowie’s 1983 commercial smash that would end up being his top-selling album.

He showed Rodgers a picture of Little Richard in a red suit getting into a red Cadillac. “Now darling,” Bowie told Rodgers, “this is what I want my album to sound like.”

“I thought, ‘Oh! He wants a record that sounds like it’s from the future even if we release the record in 3020,” Rodgers recalls. “Because that’s what this Little Richard picture looks like.”

Throughout this art-heavy book, which chronicles Bowie’s career, beginning in the early ’60s when he was a 17-year-old Davie Jones, images and words complement each other in the same way they did in Bowie’s music.

It’s impossible to encapsulate the man in a little over 200 pages, dense and illuminating as they are here, but “Portrait” manages to shed plenty of light on this brightest of stars.

“Corporate people who don’t understand performance art — the suits — would say, ‘Your image is so big, I can’t hear you sing,’ ” popster Cyndi Lauper recalls. “That’s why we all looked to Bowie, because he was one of the first performance artists, and he didn’t give a rat’s ass; he didn’t say, ‘Oh, I think I won’t dress up this time.’ He just looked at the image and the sound and put them together.”

“No matter what he did,” she adds, “Bowie was first.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.