When Lars Ulrich was growing up, his parents had a piece of artwork from Andy Warhol hanging in the dining room. It was a silkscreen print of three apples meant to signify Ulrich and his two parents. When they divorced, it was sold, and Ulrich went off to join Metallica. But the three apples bobbed away in the back of his head, nagging his subconscious.
The second he started making serious money with Metallica, he tracked down the painting and bought it back. It was his first-ever art purchase, marking the beginning of a collection that would end up making him tens of millions of dollars. In a lot of ways, although a heavy metal art fanatic might sound an odd mix, Metallica’s touring schedule lent itself well to checking out international galleries.
“I spent a lot of time sitting around on airplanes and in the late ’80s, early ’90s, I just started reading art magazines, art catalogues, getting into Sotheby’s and Christie’s catalogues and seeing different things,” Ulrich told The Talks. “Then slowly over the next couple of years I started buying things like Karel Appel, Asger Jorn, some of the Cobra guys, some of the outsider art guys like Dubuffet.”
Over the years, the paintings he’d lovingly collected grew rarer and more sought after, and he managed to sell five of them for a landmark £9.1m sum in 2002. Auctioned at the Rockefeller Centre in New York, the crown jewel of Ulrich’s collection, a 1982 Basquiat, Profit I, sold for £3.7m
Music’s intersection with art is well covered. As Ulrich pointed out, U2’s Adam Clayton has his own Basquiat, as does Lenny Kravitz. “A lot of musicians have a connection to Basquiat because they consider his whole story to be rebellious,” he explained. “They find that fairly easy to embrace. Once you start talking Asger Jorn or Karel Appel, the company gets a little more selective.” For Ulrich, a more avid art historian than most musicians, an artist’s life story is always secondary to the work.
“I’m fascinated by a creative moment, trying to guard the moment from contrived infiltration,” he told The New York Times. “So most of what we’ve been trying to do musically has been to be faithful to what comes to you in the moment. Those are the same basics I find myself connecting to in specific painters or in outsider art by guys that are institutionalised. The same thread runs through it.”
Art presented Ulrich with a lot of things. Primarily money, but also a sense of independence. He was able to reclaim a lost piece of childhood long after his parents’ divorce, and used it to curate his own sense of self outside Metallica. For the first decade, the band were together, he and James Hetfield shared a room. Outside of their often volatile relationship, this created a unique kind of co-depednecy. Collecting art, of all things, was what broke Ulrich out of it.
“When I got my first place alone, I went to buy a couch,” he recalled to Louder. “And I was sitting there thinking: ‘I wonder what James will think of it?’ This was a grown man buying a fucking couch! So going into the art world by myself was an exercise in shedding that co-dependency.”
