Throughout his life, Michael Jackson spent
a good chunk of his wealth amassing quite an extraordinary art collection,
in addition to elaborate chess sets and ornamental lamps.
The King of Pop had a penchant
for collecting commissioned paintings of himself.
The singer contacted a number of artists to make these outlandish paintings,
which depict him as his favorite fabled characters.
Michael Jackson's struggle with his image was well documented since his childhood,
where he'd hide his face in the dark and refuse to look in the mirror.
This wasn't just typical teenage self-consciousness.
It became a full-blown inferiority complex.
Brother Jermaine Jackson said in an interview.
The more he looked at himself, the unhappier he felt,
Nate Giorgio, a portrait artist of Jackson's, explained.
This is one of the reasons he commissioned paintings.
These paintings represented the image he
wanted to project for the fans as much as for himself.
Many of the portraits posed Michael,
as a figure of modern day royalty adorn an opulent garb and paired with backdrops
that befit the aesthetic environment of French monarchs from centuries ago.
As he became increasingly reclusive
amongst vicious accusations and a bottomless stream of rumors.
Jackson fell into a whimsical dreamland he created for himself.
His obsession, I think, was with getting something that was memorial.
He also wanted to talk about something he had built, which is this impossible fame.
He spoke quite readily about armor and how armor is at once something
that holds the world out but holds something in.
As part of this effort, Michael Jackson commissioned several
artists over a period of more than 25 years to bring his fairy tale fantasies
to life through an astounding number of ambitious oil paintings and murals.
Hiring one artist at a time as his
personal portrait painter, Jackson would often pay more than 150000
dollars for a large scale portrait from any artist he commissioned.
Read says Michael admired his sculptures, which include the statue of John Lennon.
And now he has a new, somewhat racier portrait of Michael Strong
says Jackson posed for us at his Neverland Ranch.
The girls represent the beauty of
the beauty of mankind and Michael's interest to mankind.
Some of their models model for us friends of ours.
It's a story about a man.
Commissioning these works allowed him
to reimagine himself however he wanted, much like kings of a bygone era.
These paintings allow Jackson to remain
in control of his own likeness and shape the narrative of his life and message.
American portrait artist Ralph Wolfe Cohen,
painting Michael Jackson four times from 1990 to the pop star,
bought the first portrait and then commissioned three more.
Shortly after Cohen's first abstract portrait depicted Jackson wearing a suit
of armor, holding a sword with a parrot perched on top of it.
Bubbles Jackson's pet monkey was portrayed sitting loyally at his feet after
the first image of the portrait was sent to Jackson's staff.
Cohen received back a strange, long relayed message when I painted it.
I had these dogs down in the bottom somewhere.
German Shepherds Michael Jackson called up his curator,
who called the guy at the gallery who called my business manager,
and he told me Michael didn't want the dogs in there.
Cohen recounted, extremely confused.
Cohen insisted he hears
from Michael Jackson himself soon after Cowan got the call.
Hello, this is Michael.
I don't like dogs.
I like monkeys.
Jackson paid thirty thousand dollars
for the eight foot tall painting, minus the dogs, which he hung in a living
room beside his piano and can be seen in the background of Jackson's well-known
nineteen ninety three televis living room interview with Oprah Winfrey.
Eventually, their working relationship deteriorated.
Cohen explained how painting
for Michael Jackson was really like working for a king.
He lived in a fantasy world,
and if he didn't like something, you felt as if he could behead you.
But the way he does it is by not calling you again.
And somewhere along the line,
he stopped calling me and I thought I had been beheaded.
The American painter David Nordahl
randomly received a phone call from Michael Jackson at his home
in Santa Fe, New Mexico, late one evening in February 1988.
He thought it was a prank at first, but Jackson convinced the artist it was
really him after describing a painting of Nordahl he had just seen
in Steven Spielberg's office earlier that day depicting a 19th century raid
on a Native American Apache camp by U.S. Army troops.
Initially, Jackson contacted Nordahl
for art lessons, and after their hour long conversation,
Jackson invited him to the Denver stop with a bad tour in March 1988.
I didn't know what to expect, David Nordahl said.
We went to galleries, bookstores and a private showing of the King Tut exhibit.
We sat around and laughed and talked.
Nordahl brought all of his equipment
and art materials so they could draw together.
It was fun,
but I noticed that he would get frustrated if he couldn't do the exercise correctly.
We worked together for a few afternoons
and I was surprised at how quickly he would catch on.
Michael was a very busy person with his
music, so it didn't leave him a lot of time to practice his drawing skills if
he had chosen to be a painter rather than an entertainer.
I'm convinced he would have been a great
artist when speaking about their first interactions, Nordahl said he had a red
corduroy shirt, black pants and loafers that were kind of broken down and back.
Michael never wore any jewelry, no rings, no belts, no watches, nothing ever.
The only time he wore those things were on stage.
I was just so impressed with how simply he lived.
Nordahl and Jackson's bond was cemented not only through their mutual artistic
appreciation, but through their shared experience of traumatic childhoods.
I grew up in a difficult home and he did too, says Nordal.
We had no playtime growing up.
We're both fanatical about work.
I can't remember not drawing, he said.
I had an abusive, alcoholic father,
and drawing is something that takes you out of the real world.
Michael Jackson then decided he wanted to commission artwork from David Nordoff.
But when Nordal first started working
with Jackson, he thought there may be a few projects.
Then he would go back to his own work.
But he was wrong.
There became so many projects that they continued to overlap each other.
So the painter left the commercial art
world to become Jackson's personal portraitist.
Over the next 17 years, this creative collaboration resulted
in thousands of drawings and roughly a dozen large scale commissions.
Jackson spent millions of dollars paying
Nordahl to transform his surreal and mythological ideas into fantasy art.
Nurdles technique took a long time, so he was not prolific.
When he left the art world to paint
for Michael Jackson, he had over 200 people on a waiting list for his work.
The artist embarked on bold statement pieces like Field of Dreams,
a 36 by 104 inch oil study for an unfinished work that would have
measured 12 by 38 feet along the sunlit path and field of dreams.
He leads children of all nationalities, plus sister djent AIDS activist
Ryan White, actor Macaulay Culkin and a fictional depiction
of Pippi Longstocking when he was in talks about the portrait.
Michael Jackson sent the artist to note
David for kids don't have truth in their heart and were dead.
It'll be as fake as manufactured flowers
with no fragrance, not shots, but kids in real life candid
situations, we must capture the true life spirit of the wonders of childhood.
If our picture has a full spectrum of human emotions, belief, truth, heart,
then the entire world will be touched from.
Generation to generation immortality,
conquer the world, love MJ in a massive creative undertaking.
Michael Jackson is depicted being crowned and knighted in royal robes.
This is one of the three studies I did
of Michael Jackson for the painting triptych.
Michael asked me to do three or four sketches featuring him being knighted,
crowned and illustrating a poem written by him.
I believe he had a particular purpose
in mind for these paintings because for the first time I was given a deadline.
Actually, this comes directly from David Nordoff and it's a painting
that he did of Michael Jackson that Michael had commissioned.
This is what Michael had seen before.
David created the masterpiece that hung at Neverland.
So this was a rendering that he did based
upon the instructions that Michael gave to him.
And then Michael looked at this piece, signed off on it, approved it,
and David created the large painting, the Algate Neverland, for many years.
So we have in all about four or five pieces from David Nordoff.
In another artwork, Michael is painted as
over eight feet tall and in a theory was seen.
The inspiration for this piece came
from a painting called Return of Spring by a 19th century artist, William Bosra,
which Michael loved Nordahl used to pose from the statue.
David by Michelangelo for Jackson in this painting.
Michael had been to see the statue in Italy many times and marveled
at the talent of the man who could create such an amazing piece of work.
Michelangelo was Michael's favorite artist
of all time, and he loved the little cherubs in this painting.
He called them his little angels.
Michael Jackson didn't only commissioned
artwork of himself, but also those dearest to him throughout the years.
In November nineteen ninety four, David Nordal spent two weeks with Michael
and Lisa Marie at the Trump Towers in New York.
The artist was there to work on two
projects for Michael while he was in the recording studio.
He remembers Michael and Lisa Marie were
great together and a lot of fun to be with.
In nineteen ninety five, Michael asked Nordahl to do a painting
of the two of them, not one to do a normal portrait.
He came out with a creative vision of how
he wanted to portray their love for each other.
Michael gave him a list of things he would
like to see in the painting in Nordahl made a sketch for him.
Jackson said he loved it not to change
a thing except to make the castle more fanciful.
Named Camelot, David Nordahl had to put
aside the completion of this painting to finish other projects for Michael.
When he completed the painting, Michael and Lisa had already separated.
Over the years, the artist had many talks about Michael Jackson's looks.
He always considered himself to be extremely ugly, he said.
He's not a handsome man.
That's why I don't do interviews and I don't go on talk shows, he said.
First of all, I don't lead an interesting life.
I work all of the time.
He never did really understand that he had that inner light
sitting and talking to Michael.
I would look into his eyes and I could see for a thousand miles he had these most
incredible eyes that come off good on film, but nothing like in person when
you're actually sitting across there looking at him.
Those eyes were unbelievable.
There were times it would just stop me in my tracks and there were times I'd be
around him where I'd kind of forget who he was.
And then it would dawn on me.
I'm sitting here next to Michael Jackson
and the 17 years I worked for him, I never really got over that.
There were times he would do these quick
little step things and they were like lightning.
It was just so quick, so precise and just amazing.
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