By Brett Gorvy Lars Ulrich's refined and passionate collection follows a fascinating art-history thread. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich discusses his passion for art. Despite being the founding member and drummer of one of the world's most famous hard rock bands, Lars Ulrich does not fit the cliched mould of the excessive rock star. On stage with his band Metallica he may seem wild, but in private he shows sensitivity, seriousness of spirit, sharp intelligence and deep passion. This is perhaps best reflected in his exceptional collection. Over the last decade, with amazing focus, scholarly research and knowledge of the market, he has collected some of the true masterpieces of Post-War and Contemporary Art. I first met Lars in summer 1995. Knowing Metallica's reputation, I was expecting a heavy-metal hardman. Instead I encountered a modest and astute individual in his early thirties. Soon becoming close friends, we worked together to assemble a collection that follows Lars' taste for expressive, emotive and monumental paintings and sculpture. Now based in San Francisco, Lars was born in Denmark, the son of tennis champion Torben Ulrich, and was especially drawn to the CoBrA artists, an international group of painters working in Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam in the early 1950s, who championed a primitive and highly expressionist art. Through careful study and bold acquisition, Lars built an amazing group of works by the leading CoBrAs, Karel Appel and Asger Jorn. In November 1995 he acquired Appel's most seminal painting, Femmes, Enfants, Animaux. Painted in 1951, it epitomises the CoBrA aesthetic on a monumental scale. Appel's painting celebrates the innocence of children and their instinctive expression. Recovering from the horrors of the War, he saw children as a symbol for a new society of hope and possibility. He imitated the bold colour and free distortion of forms he saw in children's drawings, here creating an exotic paradise with cats the size of tigers and birds sporting rainbow feathers. With Asger Jorn's outstanding In the Beginning was the Image, Lars consciously went out to find the finest work by the artist still in private hands. This extraordinary artist commands paint with the same verve and sway as Willem de Kooning. In the Beginning is an epic rendition of a primordial swamp: strange troll-like creatures and a cacophony of rich color and melting forms evoke the mystery of Nordic legends. The CoBrA artists also found inspiration in the outsider art of naïve primitives and the insane. It was natural then that Lars should go after a major work by Jean Dubuffet. Considered the greatest French Post-War artist, Dubuffet was an influential supporter of Art Brut and populated his thickly surfaced canvases with figures inspired by graffiti and children's drawings. Dubuffet's most beloved series is collectively known as Paris Circus and portrays the bustle and energy of city life with a mixture of innocent charm and comedy. Paris-Montparnasse is a classic example of Dubuffet's chaotic urban vision, the busy street a portrait of modern existence. Traffic crawls bumper-to-bumper and a jumble of armless commuters sit grinning in their pancake-flat cars or float along the pavement. Lars' collection follows a taste line encompassing dramatic expression, strong color and gesture, often informed by a deeper philosophical soul. His enormous untitled painting by Sam Francis symbolizes for me his journey as a collector: swirling lines and splatters of bright paint create a Pollock-like frieze - and out of the chaos emerge a pattern and a linear direction. Lars' desire to follow his taste line to a more-contemporary exponent led him to Jean-Michel Basquiat. A modern-day primitive and street-wise graffiti artist, Basquiat reached superstar status in the 1980s. His short but brilliant spasm of a career ended with an heroin overdose in 1988. Lars acquired several of Basquiat's finest paintings but nothing compares to the staggering bravado of Profit I. This is Basquiat's Guernica. Here he creates an icon for Black America: his hero is both warrior and crucified victim, a self-portrait, emerging triumphant from the immense darkness. Basquiat fills the space with a graffiti of strange mathematical notations, as if he were trying to compute the vastness of this hell like a deranged Leonardo. The outstanding museum quality of Lars Ulrich's paintings is already creating much excitement in the art community. Several are sure to break the existing world-record prices. Some spectators will marvel that a collector as young as Lars could have assembled this collection. Others will be amazed that a famous rock drummer could have such refined vision. Many preconceptions will be shattered. BRETT GORVY IS INTERNATIONAL SPECIALIST HEAD OF CHRISTIE'S POST-WAR AND CONTEMPORARY ART DEPARTMENT Back to top