Showing posts with label oil paint. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oil paint. Show all posts

31/01/2017

Jonathan Yeo: The Schizophrenic Neo-Society Painter

On Thursday 19th September 2013, Carol and I watched a documentary on Jonathan Yeo who was incredibly being given an exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery in London. I frankly seethed with contempt for Yeo’s illustrative and mannered kitsch portraits. I noticed, that almost as an aside, we saw Yeo take photographs of his sitters even though he then went on to make a show of painting them from life. Yet his finished work looked more the product of the camera than real study from life. Carol pointedly compared Yeo’s style to the illustrations in Woman’s Way in the 1980’s. I thought his paintings said virtually nothing about Yeo’s sitters and the only thing they said about Yeo was his taste in illustrative artists which he pastiched. There was no there - there, in Yeo’s work which was superficial and devoid of spirit. I found his rendering of faces boring and lacking any real psychological depth and his scrubbed and splattered backgrounds offensively mannered. Another small, technical, studio related reason I hated Yeo, was my disgust at his affected piling up dirty cakes of half-dry oil paint on his dirty pallet – the kind of stupid, wasteful thing - only a painter with no sense of the cost or value of oil paint would do.                              

I had seen countless artists on deviantart as technically skilled and intellectually bankrupt - but I supposed they did not have Yeo’s easy entrée into high-society or gift for self-publicity. Like so many successful people, he was apparently easy to get along with, apolitical and happy to provide the rich with a glamorous lie about themselves. I wondered what it said about art and society in 2013 that the most successful portrait artist in Britain, was in the mould of the style over substance Giovanni Boldini from the tail end of the Belle Epoch a hundred years before.                                                                                    

As with late salon portrait painters like Giovanni Boldini and Antonio Mancini, I noticed that there was a dramatic discontinuity between Yeo’s faces and backgrounds – a schizophrenic schism between illustrative portrait conventions and attempts to be fashionably painterly in the areas around the face. This may seem like a minor issue but from the first time I saw Antonio Mancini’s portraits in The Hugh Lane Museum in the mid-80s - it was an issue I had thought about a lot. I found the difference between Mancini’s heavily impastoed - almost expressionistic backgrounds - and his more conventionally naturalistic face painting - odd and not fully convincing. Even though I liked Mancini’s work, I thought he had failed to reinvent the whole surface of the picture in the radical way that Cézanne had and thus it gave Mancini’s work a schizophrenic look - torn between the traditional past and the expressive future. As for Boldini, this schism between figure and ground, had led him to use bold gestural brushstrokes in the areas surrounding the figure - that suggested proto-futurism or even proto-Abstract-Expressionism but unlike de Kooning, Boldini did not go on to deconstruct the figure. Instead, Boldini rendered the faces of his society sitters, in a perfectly modelled naturalistic way that would have been acceptable to any academic hack.                                     

A hundred years later, Jonathan Yeo, painted faces in either an uninspired blended manner that was merely a pastiche of nineteenth century academic technique or painted them in a schematic and soulless pastiche of Lucien Freud’s method of building up form through a broken patchwork of brushstrokes. But Yeo painted these conventional faces on top of an artily scrubbed background that suggested nth generation Abstract Expressionism. So like his early twentieth century counterparts, Yeo’s work was a dishonest confection of styles whose instant success - was testament to its essentially kitsch character. The inherently theatrical nature of Yeo’s work was highlighted by his sitter’s love of dressing up and presenting themselves has ham actors - inventing their own media personas. Thus Yeo’s work was lie impacted upon lie to create a glamorous illusion that simply did not convince.                                                                                        

A couple of weeks later I saw Parkinson Meets Jonathan Yeo on Sky Arts, which I watched with the relish of a critic. I thought Yeo’s porno collage of George Bush gimmicky and typically neutered like most artistic attempts to appropriate porn. It also galled me to think, I had collaged porn into my paintings decades before Yeo - and had just got abuse - not the middle-class tittering that greeted Yeo’s wannabe bad boy posturing. As for Yeo’s paintings about plastic surgery (where Yeo had painted in the marks made by plastic surgeons before operating) they simply reminded me of poor imitations of Jenny Saville’s far superior work decades before. As I watched Parkinson’s banal, middle-brow, television show, without a shred of intellectual weight, I realized that another part of Yeo’s success was his shameless desire to be loved by such an audience and convince them that he really was up there with artists like Picasso and Sargent - and at the cutting edge of contemporary art.                                

14/03/2014

Patrick Graham Half Light at Hillsboro Fine Art


On Thursday 24th October 2013, Carol and I went in to own to see the opening of Half Light a new exhibition of paintings and mixed media collages by Patrick Graham at Hillsboro Fine Art. Apart from Carol’s openings, it was the first opening we had gone to in years, and I was frankly nervous about being in public again, but I was such a fan of Graham’s work I could not miss it. Also, I was feeling at such a low about my own art I hoped to get some inspiration from the seventy year olds canvases. Before going into the exhibition we had a meal at KFC which I enjoyed more than any meal in a fancy restaurant.                

Graham’s exhibition consisted of three large diptychs in oils called Half Light and eight mixed media collages called the Lamb Series. Honestly, I was a bit disappointed by them - feeling they added little to Graham’s oeuvre. There was little to grab hold of in these new works by Graham. Apparently Half Light was an attempt to capture the spirit of the sea in Co. Mayo without resorting to direct representational imagery. For example Half Light III was basically nothing more than two grey canvases scrapped down a few times and eventually finished off with fat horizontal brushstrokes in clotted and ugly oil paint, and it had taken Graham over two years to paint. That such a minimal and to my mind still unsatisfactory work could have taken Graham two years was incredible. These minimal works simply did not inspire me with the kind of confident belief in Graham that for example the late works of Rothko did.                                                                                                                                                     

On the other hand, Graham had always built up his paintings through a constant process of painting and scraping down - to arrive at a final eloquent statement - it was just that these works paired down the recognisable imagery to an extreme I had not seen before in his work. Graham’s stripping down of the expressionist excesses of his previous work - to speak of the silence of air - seemed to be appropriate after the end of the era of decadent excess of the Celtic Tiger and the new age of austerity, condemnation and puritan self-examination. In reducing his painting to its barest expression, I felt Graham had at least caught the mood of the times where all of us were left questioning what was really important and what was merely spectacle. So I found these paintings haunt my imagination more than I had thought they would.                                                                                                                           

The mixed media collages that formed The Lamb Series, I found were similarly vague and disjointed, though they did have little sparks of figurative genius. They seemed to battle again with the themes of; the temptation of the flesh, artistic pride and an absent God, which had previously cropped up in Graham’s work. However, I wondered if Graham’s famous reaction against his early facility and illustrational modes had in these works left the viewer with little to admire. Perhaps, they did avoid obvious Expressionist theatrics and left the viewer something to muse about, however I was underwhelmed. I also noticed that this doubt about the veracity of traditional representation, led Graham to mangle form in a sadomasochistic way. Seen in reproduction, these works were even more inscrutable, so I was glad to have seen them in person. Thinking again about them, I wondered if they should have been called The Dying of the Light – a series of final repudiations of the world. I spent €10 on the exhibition catalogue, which I discovered had a very revealing interview with Graham; however the quality of the reproductions was awful.                                                                                                                                


I wanted to go up to Patrick Graham and wish him all the best, but could not summon up the courage to talk to my hero - besides I was unsure what I could say about his new work. While at the opening we met up with Rob and had a few glasses of wine. Surrounded by arty and rich people, I began to feel panicked and depressed. I felt very uncomfortable at the show, and we decided to leave early. We went for a pint in Jury’s Inn, which I need to calm my nerves. Rob drove us home and had a couple of coffees at our house which I enjoyed.                

Basil Blackshaw at Eighty



On 11th September 2012, Carol’s friend Anne drove us up to the F.E. McWilliam Gallery & Studio in Banbridge Co. Down to see a retrospective of paintings and drawings by Basil Blackshaw a painter’s painter who had been a hero of my old art teacher Kenneth Donfield. There were few Irish artists I would travel such a distance to see - but Basil Blackshaw was one of them. The border between North and South was so subtle that we looked around unsure if we had entered the North. But when we saw the Union Jack flying over housing estates - a primal shudder ran down my spine. Still apart from the flags there was little to distinguish between Republic of Ireland bungalows and Unionist bungalows. After a life time of watching ‘The Troubles’ on television, I had avoided Northern Ireland like the plague, so it was my first ever trip to the North and I was pleasantly surprised by how normal it was. The centre was a beautiful one with very friendly and helpful staff. Before going around the exhibition, Anne bought us coffees and delicious scones with cream and strawberry jam.                                                                                  

                 
I did not think much of F.E. McWilliam’s work, though I did find his more intimate and personal small sculptural maquettes more interesting than his large scale bronzes. I found F.E. McWilliam’s version of surrealism kitsch and inelegant and his expressionistic work inspired by the bombings of The Troubles unredeemably brutalistic. Looking at McWilliam’s various 3d playthings, it struck me again that sculpture could descend into abysmal kitsch faster than painting ever could. However, I admired F.E. McWilliam’s more conventional portraits and busts from early in his career – and it struck me again, that many regional artists had not profited from their modernist adventures. McWilliam seemed to have given up on such slow and deliberate study of form and turned to make a series of pastiches of fashionable styles - yet originating nothing. Still, I wondered what kind of artist he might have been if he had more integrity and courage to avoid the allure of each passing fad.                                                                      

 The retrospective of over sixty years of work by Basil Blackshaw proved to me that he was painting better and better. His early work was very strong and always wonderfully painterly with hints at an obsessive interest in Cézanne and Walter Sickert. More conservative art lovers must have been most impressed by his realist paintings and drawings of horse races but I found them somewhat irrelevant in the age of photography and lacking the intimacy of his paintings of his pets. Though, Blackshaw’s portraits of friends (mostly male) were evocative, I personally found his ‘portraits’ of his dogs and horses truly insightful and full of love and respect. Blackshaw never made a casual or sloppy brushstroke though his freedom and searching might have made the unsophisticated think otherwise. He was a master of creams, browns, greys, blacks and muted colours - yet his efforts at strong pure colour did not convince me.                                                                                   
                                                                
It was Blackshaw’s paintings since the age of sixty-eight that most impressed me. They married a modern day freedom reminiscent of Cy Twombly and even Basquiat (especially with their deployment of writing and painterly erasure) with a lifetime of realist skills and criticality – to create some of the strongest arguments in favour of contemporary painting. They were so much more than mere ideas in paint - they were paint come to life to embody a spiritual manifestation. His hard-won virtuosity went beyond uncritical illustration, tedious realism and crass expression into a painterly grandeur only a few ever achieved. In his late paintings he made everything look childishly easy - but as a fellow painter I knew what kind of mental and physical labour had gone into such final life affirming freedom. These late paintings were some of the very best and most relevant I had seen in years. I felt inspired to paint in the presence of such valiant and free expressions. Before we left we bought the catalogue for the exhibition, however I was disappointed when I saw how poorly lit, discoloured and unfocused the reproductions of the paintings were.                                                                                                                      

Strangely in retrospect, I found my initial impression of Blackshaw’s work diminished. His early work struck me as too academic and his later work overshadowed by the far greater examples of Cy Twombly and Jean Michel Basquiat, still he was one of the few real painters in Ireland.

States of Feeling at Hillsboro Fine Art


On the last day of August 2012, Carol and I went into town to see States of Feeling at Hillsboro Fine Art which included late paintings by Robert Motherwell and recent paintings by Gary Komarin and Larry Poons. Although I regarded Motherwell as the most significant of the three painters, his late work on show was mostly a minor reworking on a small scale his early abstract imagery. These small, late Motherwell’s were turgid and uninspiring - unlike his earlier signature works - though they played with similar amorphous, torso like shapes. The Komarin paintings were a revelation to me, since I had never heard of him or see his any of work. Though I detected echoes of Richard Diebenkorn, the Komarin paintings lacked any significant originality of form or style. Still, I found his deceptively simplified abstractions with dusty colours and splashy shapes very evocative.                                                                                           
However, it was Larry Poons paintings that left the strongest impression on me. Poons was a survivor of the vagaries of art world fashion that had briefly held him up as a major painter in the early 1960s but had slowly turned away from him as abstract painting’s dominance was challenged and then overthrown by Pop, installations, video and performance art. As young artist Poons’ hero was Mondrian and he consciously avoided the legacy of de Kooning that had turned so many weaker talents into pasticher’s of de Koonings hooked dynamic brushstrokes. Yet, despite his early fascination with geometric abstraction, Poons had later became one of the most energetic revitalizer’s of expressive abstraction. Over a sixty year career, Poons abstract painting had progressed from Geometric to Op-Art, to Post-Painterly Abstraction and in his last years a more expressive style that hinted at figurative elements. A good friend of Jules Olitski, in the late 1960s he had turned away from the more planned and structured abstract work that had initially made his reputation, to produce more spontaneous free form canvases in which he poured paint in rivulets down the canvas and then cropped them where appropriate. Yet, such canvases that often looked like abstract variations of Monet’s late water lily canvases were derided as mere backgrounds by many.                                                                                                       
  
I appreciated the free paint handling and form making Poons had arrived at after a lifetime of devotion to abstraction. His broken line and shimmering, scintillating colour reminded me of late Bonnard. I had thought they would be in oils, so I was surprised to find they were in acrylic often manipulated with his hands. Poons’ colour was electric and his handling of paint full of feeling. I thought they were some of the most exquisitely beautiful abstracts I had seen in years. Poons work made me want to get back to painting - the highest compliment I could possibly give. We topped off the day with a meal in KFC and a rummage around the art books in Chapters and Easons.

13/03/2014

Julian Schnabel Do You Know My Name?

"Recently Julian Schnabel and I walked through the almost complete installation of his exhibition in the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato, Italy. We stopped before the painting ‘70th Week’, and Julian said, “I like this one because it’s so fucked up.” “Yes,” I said. “It really is fucked up. I like it too.” The other critic, however, questioned this as a positive critical term. He inquired further, why Julian had painted the words “70th Week” on the canvas. The fact that in some cases Julian didn’t know why he used certain words seemed to bother him, too. The critic’s questions raised significant issues which have been shaping themselves with increasing clarity in this artist work over the past decade. These include the aesthetic issue – is fucked up beautiful? – the issue of language, and the issue of randomness or lack of accountability. These issues are all involved in the most significant event in recent art history – the over throw of the Kantian theory of art which dominated Modernism with its ideas of universality and unchanging quality, and its subsequent reinstatement in a radically modified form.”
Thomas McEvilley, ‘Read This’, Julian Schnabel, Fox Farm Paintings, The Pace Gallery, 1989, P. 5.


“‘A language has to be found’, wrote Rimbaud in a letter, a ‘universal language’ in which every word will be an idea, a new language ‘of the soul, containing everything, smells, sounds, colours; thought latching onto thought and pulling’. It is this language that would ‘bring forth formlessness’ from its own formlessness, madness from its own madness. It would reveal the poet as seer. Schnabel wants to be what Rimbaud said the first Romantics were, seers. But they were ‘seers without quite realizing it’; in this day and age one must realize it, as Schnabel knows. For this is a time that has no use for seers, that thinks it sees and knows all... Schnabel knows an even greater desperateness, because of the aggravated absurdity of the times, which no longer needs ‘the unknown’ Rimbaud pursued, which no longer is interested in the ‘faith and superhuman strength’ of a single individual, determined to become ‘the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed – and the great learned one!’ This is a world that cares about greatness only as a novelty, not as a choice of existence, as a pursuit of the unspeakable – the destiny – in existence.”
Donald Kuspit, Julian Schnabel, Waddington Galleries, 1985.


At the end of 1991, I bought ‘Julian Schnabel: Works on Paper 1975-1988’. Initially I was put off by the slap-dash character of Schnabel’s drawings - which at the time - I thought looked little better than mindless doodles. I wondered at a world in which such simplistic smears of paint were considered great art. When they were shown in Chicago they were viewed by an equally sceptical Roberta Smith: “Schnabel's works on paper - lightweight confections that are frequently upstaged by their stylish frames... Schnabel's blustering grandiosity, which may be at its worst on paper... His drawings corroborate his catholic (both lower and upper case) taste, with frequent crosses, collaged reproductions of Renaissance art, and cowhide or splattered-canvas borders. But mainly Schnabel seems to borrow heavily from other contemporary artists, especially Joseph Beuys in the early years and, more recently, Cy Twombly. The drawings, which tend to look better in the catalogue than in the flesh, are strongest when their size and physicality approach that of his paintings, as in an untitled work done on a large thick swatch of posters that seems to have been torn off a brick wall... Schnabel is wrapped up in the myth of his own life as an artist, producing numerous drawings with titles like ''Notes From a Bad Summer'' and ''Letter to My Wife.''” (Roberta Smith, Art View; Three Good Reasons for Less Self-Indulgence, The New York Times, 2ed September 1990.) Yet I also envied Schnabel. How lucky he was to have his every scribble of paint considered epic, tragic, metaphysical and profound! Later my familiarity with Beuys’s drawings and later Cy Twombly helped me to understand the origin of Schnabel’s drawing style and soon I grew to love them in a guilty way. This was a level of skill – I could easily imitate! I adored the work of Schnabel, most of my life. At the same time, studying his critical reception, gave me insights into the dilemmas of the expressive and instinctive painter.


What I admired about Schnabel was his reinvention of Abstract-Expressionism and the myth of the male painter. Like other admirers of Schnabel, I responded to the expression of feeling that was so central to his art. As Donald Kuspit observed: “Schnabel’s pictures are brilliant propaganda for the modern faith in feeling as the last court of resort for understanding. One invests one’s feelings in Schnabel’s paintings, as in Caravaggio’s, because of their ambiguous dramatic effect – which is what we come to believe in, since it correlates with our self-protective ambivalence and delusions of grandeur (omnipotence).” (Donald Kuspit, The Rhetoric of Rawness in Julian Schnabel’s Paintings, The New Subjectivism: Art in the 1980s, New York: De Capo Press, 1993, P. 298.)


I loved the macho quality of Schnabel’s work, the way he turned his lack of conventional figurative skills to his advantage and created ever more interesting ways to make a painting. I loved the way he reinvented the surfaces of his work constantly. I loved his ambition – his drawings were bigger than most of my paintings! And most of his paintings were so elaborately constructed and huge - they would not fit in my home! I loved the fact that Schnabel’s work built on and echoed and amplified the work of other artists I admired. I loved the way Schnabel’s abstracts had personal auto-biographical meanings and memories behind - them rather than the Theosophical nonsense of Kandinsky and Mondrian, the religiosity of Rothko, the Formalism of Morris Louis or the Post-Modern nihilism of the virtuoso Gerhard Richter. I loved the luxurious self-indulgence of Schnabel’s expressivity and sense of self. I found his work as moreish as a box of Belgian chocolates and just as sickly afterwards. More than any artist of my day, Schnabel was who I dreamed of being. But I was too insane, perverted and pathetic.


Unlike Schnabel, I had virtually no interest in formal abstract issues, and I presented a broken and perverted self rather than a macho alpha male persona. My art from 1987-1996, was primarily therapeutic in purpose. I was trying to create - in moments of extreme anxiety, self-hate and suicidal despair – so I could stave off the urge to mutilate or kill myself for a few hours more. That is just one reason why my work and life was not like Schnabel – who painted for fame, money, girls and social approval. Unlike Schnabel, I loathed other people, hated talking about my art, hated being interviewed, hated the media and social world. And unlike Schnabel, my insanity made it impossible for me to bear either criticism or praise. 


Julian Schnabel, was one of the most fascinating case histories in art history. Though he wanted to be the new Picasso or Pollock of his times, Schnabel ended up being closer to a nineteenth century Salon painter like Hans Makart with similar bad taste and love of historical replay but minus Makart’s technical skill – rich and famous beyond the dreams of any starving artist yet lampooned by many of his peers and critics. In the early 1980s as he thrust himself to super-stardom as a painter of ever more gargantuan canvases - he became a favourite target for critic’s keen to find even wittier put downs of his work and personality. By the early 1990s, Schnabel was well out of critical favour - and worse still - no longer fashionable. As the figurehead for the excesses of the 1980s art market and its subsequent catastrophic collapse, Schnabel became a figure of derision and collectors had already moved on to buying up Neo-Geo and yBa work. Robert Hughes summed up the general view of Schnabel in the art world by the late 1990s, "Perhaps no painter ever got more mileage out of the supposition that bad drawing plus thick, roiled paint equals passionate feeling. In fact, it turned out to be a code like any other. It was the sensibility of a disgruntled but hardworking teenager; theatrical, maundering, and immovably convinced of its own boyish genius." (Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, London: The Harvill Press, 1997, P. 599.) In art criticism, it is easier to put down mediocrity than explain genius and the fact that Schnabel thought himself a genius while often producing such ham-fisted work only made their job more entertaining. Arthur Danto a professor of philosophy even took up regular art reviews for the Nation in disgusted response to the rise of the likes of Schnabel and the Neo-Expressionists. He said, “This wasn’t supposed to happen next” (Arthur C. Danto, The State of The Art, Prentice Hall Press, 1987, P. 209.) Danto’s actual criticism of Schnabel was not very original or to the point and mostly he dammed Schnabel for being a standard bearer for an art market desperate for something that looked superficially new - even when art as a revolutionary form had actually come to an end according to Danto with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes in 1964. In his later life, Schnabel’s constant refrain was that most people knew nothing about painting – but sadly for him – many of those that did know about painting simply did not believe that his canvases lived up to the grandiose claims made for them by Schnabel. Moreover, in an era of second-wave feminism, and the New Man, many found Schnabel’s macho posturing offensive and retrograde.


The fact that despite all this critical gangbanging Schnabel continued to paint, continued to sell, continued to live a life of luxury, and go on to have a second successful career as a filmmaker only proved the irrelevancy and impotency of criticism after the era when Greenberg and Rosenberg had dominated the art world. The art market had overtaken the art world and critical respect meant little compared with commercial viability. Much of the vitriol heaped on Schnabel in the early 1980’s was purely based on jealousy and a feeling of disenfranchisement by artists whose conceptual vision was rendered briefly irrelevant. The trouble was that the art Schnabel’s critics offered as an alternative was as Rene Ricard wrote “the pits” (Rene Ricard, Not About Julian Schnabel, Artforum, Summer 1981.) Still, their revenge upon his work would mean that by the late eighties he was a pariah amongst the New York art world cognoscenti and after his Whitney retrospective in 1987 he would be given no further museum retrospective in New York. In the end though, Schnabel had the last laugh. He had an unshakeable belief in himself and capacity to push on regardless, so that although he never regained the artistic prestige that say Kiefer maintained through monotonousness, Schnabel still managed to sell hundreds of canvases for five figure sums and branched out into ventures in interior design and film.  

Despite or perhaps because of the critical and fashionable disdain Schnabel attracted – I remained faithful to his work. When sleeping, I have had many art related dreams in my life, but I have had more about Schnabel exhibitions than any other artist. My second girlfriend Carol once said, “I think you are in love with him!” In a way she was right, I was certainly more interested in Schnabel than in virtually anyone else. I loved his aesthetic clumsiness the way one loves a mongrel dog - forgiving its quirkiness - in fact loving it more because of its quirkiness. I admired his constant experimentalism and fearlessness. I admired his risk taking and his lack of shame or self-editing. 

I first came across Julian Schnabel in 1988 when I saw him interviewed on a television program. At the time, he was painting his monstrously large ‘Recognition Paintings’ on old army tarpaulins and boxing rings and many of these works were featured in the program. I instantly fell in love with this brash American, who looked like a young Orson Wells, painted in his pajamas, and made the support of his paintings a fetishistic element of its meaning. He painted on such varied surfaces as broken crockery on wood, velvet, animal hides, rugs, linoleum, aluminium, pile rugs, found wood, printed fabric, tarpaulin and as his career progressed he added ship sails and shop awnings. Most shocking of all since he was breaking the fundamental rule of consideration for other people’s art was Schnabel’s over-painting of Kabuki backdrops and the anonymous work of painter’s work found in junk shops. 

I also felt an instant empathy with the bad-boy character of Schnabel - in much the same way I had with Egon Schiele and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The fact that his brand of aggressive, egotistical and Neo-Expressionist art had been so successful gave me hope that my own art would eventually be accepted. Unlike Schnabel who dismissed anyone who criticised him and ignored their opinions, I read and re-read Schnabel’s critics - and with my persecution complex - felt anything they said about his art could also be applied even more cruelly to mine. While Schnabel felt no one could teach him anything - I listened to even destructive advice and could not help taking it on-board. While Schnabel’s ego was impenetrable – mine was riven with self-loathing, self-doubt and shame. Perhaps as a Cypher with a depressive lack of self-worth – I looked to the arrogant likes of Schnabel to fill the void in my own ego. One of the key things I was attracted to in Schnabel’s paintings was its lack of taste (for want of a better word.) I viewed Schnabel’s work as a desecration of the formal purity of Minimalist paintings and installations and the empty conceptualism of the Neo-Dadaists. As a youth, I found Schnabel’s vulgar rule breaking bewitching. His oil paintings on broken crockery were for me a return to the decadence and power of painting, and Schnabel’s lack of style all played a part in this. Schnabel eschewed the notion of stylistic maturation and growth, and emphasized creative playfulness. “Signaturizing is getting paid to stop thinking. (America loves signatures, consistency to the point of dullness.) Signaturizing is a trap. It is artists believing that their work should always have the same appearance. They’re satisfied to let this appearance be the emblem of their art, because it’s what people have come to expect them to do. This is either a sign of arrogance, resignation, or atrophy. (Maybe they only have one idea and I’m being too hard on them.) Giacometti is an artist whose singularity of vision (and persistence) dispels this generality but he is, certainly, an exception.” (Julian Schnabel, CJV: Nicknames of Maitre D’s & Other Excerpts From Life, New York: Random House, 1987, P. 36.) All of which I intensely empathized with and sought to draw strength from. To me painting was primarily a pleasure and a personal source of growth and realization, not a pursuit of a commercial logo.  


The massive size and unique surfaces of Schnabel’s paintings made them must-sees. Photographs simply could not give you any real idea of their scale or surface. This is why I found my isolation so infuriating in regards to the likes of Schnabel. Living in Ireland in the 1980s I found it almost impossible to find even a book on Schnabel, and worse still in an Irish world that followed the opinions of the likes of Robert Hughes like lapdogs - Schnabel was not even mentioned. Also, it was long before the Internet had made visual and intellectual research so easy, today you can just type in Julian Schnabel to ‘Google Images’ and in a second, view hundreds of his art works on line. Therefore, it was only in 1990 when my mother bought me The New Image by Tony Godfrey - that I had a book with two of his paintings and one ink drawing! Later in the year, I bought Art Expo 1988 - which had a cover story and five paintings by him! So it went for years – picking up an image here or there, but never really knowing the full extent of his art or career. If I had been researching someone like Keith Haring and found so few paintings it would have not been such a problem – if you see one painting by Haring you have pretty much seen them all. But every Schnabel painting I saw was completely different to the last.


Later in Amsterdam in November 1992 - I managed to buy three catalogues on Schnabel and his autobiography CVJ: Nicknames of Maitre D’s & Other Excerpts from Life published in 1987 - they were some of the most joyful and meaningful purchases of my life. In 1994, I saw Bob’s World an early plate painting by Schnabel in the Temple Bar Gallery and loved its theatrical, kitsch, Post-Modern Expressionism. Through the late 1990s I sent off to antiquarian bookshops like Ursus Books in Manhattan for catalogues on Schnabel – it was an expensive but rewarding habit. I greeted each catalogue in my post-box with the giddy excitement of a child at Christmas. However, by the turn of the millennium my passion for his work had waned. So that by the time I saw my first major retrospective of his work in Madrid in 2004, I found it a huge let down. I found that many of the works lacked real soul, intensity or drama and I dammed him as a Playboy Expressionist. Yet by the end of the noughties my passion for his work renewed again, as I tried to re-fire the Expressive core of my own art. After my mother’s death in 2009, one of the only things that kept me going was collecting books and catalogues on Schnabel on Amazon and AbeBooks. In 2009, I saw an exhibition of Schnabel’s prints in the Hillsboro Fine Art gallery in Dublin which I also enjoyed immensely - finding Schnabel’s prints based on paintings he had made very sensual and painterly. Today I have 60 catalogues, books and folios devoted to Schnabel as well as numerous ones featuring works by Schnabel and for Christmas 2014 my girlfriend Carol bought me two Julian Schnabel designed illy mugs featuring his portraits of Chuck from 2009. Living the relative squalor of my suburban terrace house – I collected Schnabel catalogues - imagining a similar expressive grandeur - I would never achieve. In January 2018, I also bought a DVD of Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait the privately commissioned documentary on his life, art and films. In spending so much of my time and money buying Julian Schnabel catalogues and books, I was not only feeding my fascination with Schnabel’s work. I was also rebelling against the swarm of contemporary artists I was constantly being told were talented and important. For me virtually the only living artist worth a dam was Julian Schnabel. 


In 1986, Thomas Lawson the great polemicist against Neo-Expressionism, had ironically observed the influence Schnabel had on younger painters: “… he even fools some of his fellow artists into believing that they could seek a new authenticity by imitating him.” (Thomas Lawson, Toward Another Laocoön or, The Snake Pit, Artforum, March 1986.) And I was equally naïve in my pastiching of Schnabel to create ‘authetic’ works of my own. From 1991-1999 and again from 2007-2019, Schnabel’s influence on the formal look of my paintings was enormous. In the winter of 1990 - I took from Schnabel’s broken plate surfaces - by painting on sheets of thick paper that I collaged roughly with smaller thick sheets of paper. Like Schnabel, I enjoyed the idea of upsetting the surface of the support and creating problems of painting and drawing for myself - hoping that such disruptions to facility would yield rewarding results. Then from the autumn of 1992 I adopted Schnabel’s mannerism of “accidentally” smearing, blotting, and staining my drawing paper - trying to give the work a worn look (and disguising the technical inadequacies of the actual drawing.) The result was a rather studied sloppiness. It was a mannerism that Schnabel took himself from the likes of Victor Hugo, Antonin Artaud, Joseph Beuys and Cy Twombly.
            

Later from 1995-1999 and even still in the late noughties, I took from Schnabel his use of biomorphic shapes particularly in white gesso, his Baroque sense of colour and his use of large evocative words. Like Schnabel, I saw abstraction as metaphorically speaking to personal experience and memory rather than to a formal code.


From mid-1996 until early 1998, and again from 2007-2019, I was most stirred by Schnabel’s Neo-Abstract-Expressionist paintings that were like pumped up Cy Twombly drawings slathered and smeared on mural sized tarpaulin. In 1997, I was influenced by his over-painting on top of junk shop paintings by anonymous amateurs – and took one of my family paintings owned by my mother and father The Light House which I over-painted and called Child of History. In the same year my War Map Paintings – were influenced by Schnabel’s paintings over old maps – something he had borrowed from artists like Michael Tracey, Robert Motherwell and Robert Rauschenberg. Like Picasso, Schnabel gave me an important example in his rejection of the trap of a signature style. Moreover, his self-aggrandizing writing style shamefully influenced my own throughout the late 1990s and again in the late noughties.


Julian Schnabel was born on the 26th October 1951, in Brooklyn, New York to Esther a Jewish American and Jack Schnabel a Czechoslovakian emigrant who had stowed away on a boat to New York at sixteen and prospered as a meat packer and entrepreneur. Julian later credited his work ethic to his hardworking father Jack.  With a brother Stephen and a sister Andrea nine years older than him Julian was the youngest and his mother’s pet.  They grew up in Flatbush the upper middleclass Jewish suburb of Brooklyn. Schnabel recalled that there was no art or handmade things in his home and that he had to create his own artistic world there. “My parents had no idea about art, I needed to build my own world for myself. And the only thing they really armed me with was enthusiasm and love and a feeling that I could do anything.” (Mick Brown, Julian Schnabel: Larging It, The Telegraph, 19th January 2008.) A plump, high-stung boy, he did not excel at academic subjects or sport and found it difficult making friends. His mother Esther Schnabel told Michael Stone how when Schnabel was four they were at the Royal Palm hotel in Miami and he saw other children playing in the swimming pool so Julian jumped right in despite the fact he couldn’t swim. He would exhibit the same reckless abandon in his later pursuit of art and filmmaking. 


In CVJ Schnabel disconcertingly admits that in third-grade, he developed an alter-ego named Jack the Bellboy who made art under his mother’s kitchen table and drew ‘self-portraits’ for other children at school. But when he becomes famous in CVJ - he proclaims himself JULIAN SCHNABEL. His mother indulged Julian’s artistic passion. His mother would take him out to French restaurants and local museums.  When he was nine his mother sent Julian to the Brooklyn Museum School to take a painting class. However, he needed to be thirteen to use oils, so Julian stayed at home and drew neo-classical sculptures – which later featured in his mature paintings like ‘St. Sebastian – Born in 1951’, from 1979.

In 1965, when he was fourteen his father Jack moved the family to Brownsville Texas where Jack was to work in a used clothes store. Brownsville on the Mexican border had a population of just 36, 000 and they were the only Jewish family. Julian did not fit in, never had a date and did not go to his senior prom. He learned to play the guitar and surf by the sea that was about twenty-three miles from his home. Apart from painting, surfing was the only thing he could do well. “Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are. I found a similarity in surfing and painting, maybe because it wasn’t a team sport, maybe because of the constant sensation of drowning.” (Julian Schnabel, CJV: Nicknames of Maitre D’s & Other Excerpts From Life, New York: Random House, 1987, P. 49.)

He smoked grass and ate hallucinogenic mushrooms and peyote with his friend Van Deren Potts. They made trips together to Mexico where Julian saw Mexican murals in Mexico City and the Zapotec ruins of Mitla outside the city of Oaxaca. He went to The University of Huston to study fine art and gained a BFA. In provincial Huston there was little interest in the Minimalist and Conceptual art then big with the cognoscenti in New York, the Texas art scene was more notable for outsider, primitive and Hispanic influenced work with a morbid religious edge. Schnabel lived off campus above Fast Eddies Beauty Parlor and earning money painting cartoons on the topless dancers at Rembrandt’s Paint Factory. He began seeing Jane Kallina a photographer studying fine art at the University of St. Thomas. Schnabel’s early paintings were a schizophrenic, Art Brut looking version of Hockney’s paintings made as a youth in the Royal Academy of Art - a mixture of primitive images and words - but with the implied sadomasochism and bondage of Richard Lindner. They were appallingly bad and unsurprisingly they were rarely reproduced or shown in his retrospectives. “He seemed to be trying to locate himself in his society,” Richard Stout one of his teachers said, when interviewed by Michael Stone in New York magazine in 1992. “A lot of his subjects had to do with women, with himself, with party scenes.” Though he battled with many of his teachers they recognized his talent. Joe Glasco a Texan artist who had worked in Mexico in the 1940s became a mentor to the young Schnabel who also admired the work of Michael Tracey whose fetishistic religious imagery drew on Mexican sources.  
            

From 1973-74 Schnabel attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Programme in New York. He famously sent his slides in between two slices of bread – he got a place. He rented the sculptor Joel Shapiro’s loft and agreed to paint it in exchange. During the year, he worked as a sunglass salesman and taxi driver. In May 1975 in the magazine Art-Rite’s painting edition Schnabel was featured and described by Edit DeAK as a “Dog Painter” since his canvases at the time featured them. He became a regular at artist hangouts like Spring Street Bar, El Quijote and Max’s Kansas City letting everyone know he was going to become a great artist. “Before he learned to cook, Schnabel drove a cab. Discovering, one evening, that his passenger was an art dealer, he took the opportunity to convey a grievance. No one – no dealer, no critic, no curator – would look at his work, said Schnabel. It was worse than unfair, it was cruel, and stupid, too, because he was doing extremely good work. He deserved studio visits. He deserved a gallery. He was a great artist in the making. The dealer Julian Weissman, still remembers the ferocity of Schnabel’s anger. Schnabel doesn’t recall the incident. There were many like it, for he was constantly angry in those days.” (Carter Ratcliff, The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996 P. 277.)

At a studio visit, the artists David Diao and Gary Stephan, suggested to Julian that he take a nurses hat made of plaster out of his painting ‘Red Cross Painting for Norman Fisher’. Schnabel took their advice but later felt he had ruined his painting, leading him to conclude in his memories: “Never listen to anybody when it comes to being responsible for your own paintings. It’s a mistake for young artists to want to please older ones. They’re going to make you take out of your paintings the very things that most characterize them as yours. You might think that someone is really smarter than you are, or wiser, or more experienced, and they may be. But you can’t listen to them because nobody knows better than you what you need to do. Most older artists are going to try to get you to conform to the standards that you are out to destroy anyway.” (Julian Schnabel, CJV: Nicknames of Maitre D’s & Other Excerpts From Life, New York: Random House, 1987, P. 23.)



Schnabel’s early work, played with abstraction and the physical nature of the canvas as an object. He carved a small soap-dish like relief into early encaustic canvases, played with inner and outer forms in canvases in which he drew crude male torsos inside which he drew vein like lines - that also looked like cracks in a sculptural bust. Early heroes were Barnet Newman and his famously anaemic abstractions that sought a simplified evocation of the spiritual. He looked at Beuys’s drawings and his sculptural works. He admired Brice Marden’s elegant encaustic canvases with their subtlety modulated colours’ and tones and their soft, evocative surfaces. “Brice had been using a wax medium to mix with his paint to make a matte surface. He had been attributed by some as the maker of the last paintings. I thought that meant all of the information had been buried under the wax of all those paintings. Thinking about it now, I’d call those paintings a panel of meaning. They were a tablet, a clean slate, a place to begin to reintroduce language into painting.” (Julian Schnabel, CJV: Nicknames of Maitre D’s & Other Excerpts From Life, New York: Random House, 1987, P. 27.) Schnabel’s plate paintings may have come from a eureka moment in Barcelona, but it came after a few years of exploration of the nature of the canvas as a sculptural relief by Schnabel. 


One night when drinking heavily at Max’s Kansas City with Neil Williams, David Diao and Brice Marden, Schnabel got into a heated argument with Brice Marden thirteen years his senior, who took a dislike to Schnabel’s youthful presumptuousness. Afterwards he went back to David Diao’s studio with Marden to look at Diao’s new paintings. Schnabel said they weren’t finished. Marden said he didn’t have the right to speak because he was just a student. They ended up in a fistfight. Schnabel was shocked by the hostility of older artists towards younger ones. Also at Max’s Schnabel met Ernst Mitzka a professor from Hamburg. Through him, he met Blinky Palermo (his real name was Peter Schwarze) and Sigmar Polke two young German painters who would influence his work profoundly. They all went to Philadelphia to see Duchamp’s large glass painting ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even’ from 1915-23, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Palermo who had been Joseph Beuys star pupil, made evocative minimalist abstract canvases and ‘paintings’ made of bands of shop-bought cloth that both parodied and eulogized the work of Rothko and Newman. Polke too worked with fabrics mounted on canvas which he over-painted with ironic popular imagery. In 1977, Palermo - a self-destructive alcoholic - went to the Maldive Islands trying to track down a girlfriend and died under mysterious circumstances due to an overdose of barbiturates. In 1981, in thick oils and modelling paste on maroon velvet, Schnabel would paint The Unexpected Death of Blinky Palermo in the Tropics in memory of his dead friend - the first of many sentimental homage’s to departed friends by Schnabel. 


Yet despite these friendships, “Others were unbeguiled. Bruce Wolmer, then at MoMA, remembers a first meeting with Schnabel in “pink jelly glasses.” Wolmer’s date admired them. “Right away he offered to find her a pair. He was almost too obliging. I felt his hunger. I felt, I hope he doesn’t get anywhere.” Wolmer admits that he remembered Schnabel now and again, a bit smugly, because he did indeed seem to have disappeared. “I thought, Well, that’s the last we’ll see of him.” (Anthony Haden-Guest, True Colours: The Real Life of the Art World, New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996, P. 88-89.)


In 1975, Schnabel moved back to Texas for eight months after failing to break New York. He found the small town provincialism of Texas suffocating. He featured in a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum in Huston but it was a flop. After breaking up with Jane Kalline for what he thought was the last time, Schnabel painted the first version of Jack the Bellboy (A Season in Hell) a beige canvas reminiscent of Antoni Tàpies, at the centre of which was a plaster head surrounded by horizontal roach like forms scored through with vertical lines – suggestive of the marking of time of a prisoner in a cell, or a drug addict toting up his smoking habit. Part-painting, part-relief Schnabel mixed oil paint with joint-compound which he then gouged into to create the airless window in the background and roach like shapes around the plaster head.  It was a breakthrough painting for Schnabel, it had a dumb originality and suggested an awkward potential and he discovered his gift as a sculptural painter. His painter friend Ross Bleckner visited him in Huston and they visited Michael Tracy and Joe Glasco’s studios. He took a job as a cook in the Grape Restaurant in Dallas for a few months and this experience later helped him to get work in New York restaurants.


He returned to New York in 1976, and again was hired to paint a loft – this time owned by Ross Bleckner a painter his own age - who quickly decided Schnabel was not the employable - kind but the two became close friends. Ross Bleckner would go on to make fuzzy abstract canvases with a moody apocalyptic look. Schnabel worked as a cook at Mickey Ruskin’s hip Ocean Club where Ellen Barkin, Glenne Headly and the artist Sherrie Levine waited tables and the likes of John Cale, Lou Reed and David Byrne hung out and jammed. Schnabel’s sous-chef in the Ocean Club was David Salle and the two became friends. Both were Jewish and had worked as cooks, but that is where the similarities ended. Salle would become known for his multi-panel paintings that mixed high art, popular culture and soft-core porn references in a manner reminiscent of James Rosenquist but with a cold scepticism that spoke of Post-Modern ennui. Salle was a more intellectual and cynical painter than the blustering and sentimental Schnabel and their brief friendship echoed the likes of Jasper John’s with Robert Rauschenberg. Schnabel and Salle shared an interest in the late ‘bad’ paintings of Francis Picabia the Dada virtuoso of irony, in particular Picabia’s transparency paintings in which he overlapped images, his retrograde nudes based on soft-core magazines and his late symbolic abstracts. In the late 1970s, Schnabel and Salle often visited Europe. Schnabel went once as an assistant to Les Levine the media artist, “Every time we would go into a museum he’d look at things that close,” Levine says, indicating about ten inches. “To a point where it was difficult for anybody else to look at the paintings. Julian is primarily interested in technique.”” (Anthony Haden-Guest, True Colours: The Real Life of the Art World. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press 1996, P. 92.)


In the fall of 1976, Schnabel travelled to Europe with his girlfriend Jean who was an aspiring model. They visited Paris and Milan and lived in Tuscany until April 1977. While in Italy Schnabel visited the Giotto chapel in Padua, which had a big impact on his vision of how a painting could occupy space and be a physical object like a wall as well as an image upon it. He was commissioned to paint ten large canvases and provided a studio and materials by a Ruggero Jannuzzelli a prince from Naples. As part of the deal, Jean and Julian could go horse riding at the princes’ castle. 


Schnabel’s travelling through Europe from 1976-78, was an odd move at the time for an American painter - considering that most of his generation where insular, parochial and xenophobic. American painters especially those in New York had a superiority complex over Europe, which they thought had become irrelevant. That Schnabel so lovingly learnt from Ancient and Modern European art (even if his learning was amateurish) marked him out as almost unique. What Schnabel discovered in Europe apart from old art was a New Wave of German and Italian Neo-Expressionist painters and sculptors who were producing heartfelt work which mixed old and new, Expressive and traditional. 
 

The 1960s and 1970s had been dominated by impersonal styles like Pop Art, Op Art, Photo-realism, Minimalism and Conceptualism. The personal was abandoned in favour of the commercial, the social, the political and the theoretical. What artists like George Baselitz, Anslem Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, Francisco Clemente, Sandro Chia and Enzo Cucchi were trying to do was bring forward a more personal and idiosyncratic form of art embodied in increasingly traditional mediums like; oil paint, chalk pastel, watercolour, woodblock, ink, cast bronze or chain-sawed wood. Their work pastished, plagiarised, quoted and requoted the art of the German Expressionists, the Symbolist's, Dada, Abstract-Expressionism and even Pop Art and Conceptualism. They took the early expressive imagery of Modernist masters like Kirchner, Beckman, Picasso and Pollock and blew it up onto huge scale canvases unseen since the Venetian masters Titian, Paulo Veronese and Tintoretto.



In 1977, Schnabel returned to New York and worked as a cook at the Locale Restaurant until 1978. It was a haunt for many artists and every Sunday Schnabel would cook for them. In fact, Schnabel became known for his generosity of spirit towards other artist he liked. It was here that Schnabel met the likes of the minimalist sculptor Carl André and the curator Nick Serota.


Crucially it was also at one of these dinners that Julian met the young dealer Mary Boone who would give him his first big break in New York. Boone had worked as a secretary at the Bykert Gallery that represented the likes of Brice Marden and Chuck Close. When opening her own small gallery, she cunningly chose the same building that housed the Castelli Gallery and Sonnabend Gallery knowing that the passing traffic would visit her own gallery. When she visited Schnabel’s small studio stacked with his huge canvases she was immediately impressed. “I was struck by the incredible physicality of the paint. It was lush. Holes were dug out of it.” (Anthony Haden-Guest, True Colours: The Real Life of the Art World. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press 1996, P. 94.) Another dealer, Holly Solomon was also interested in showing Schnabel and bought Jack the Bellboy (A Season in Hell) and introduced him to the Saatchi’s who became early bulk buyers of his work. Doris Saatchi, proclaimed in 1982, that Schnabel’s sudden success was because “we need him, in a risky world, to risk for all of us the humiliation, the frustration, and the mighty exhaustion of self-expression. We need him to show us how to feel.” (Doris Saatchi, Artscribe, 1982.) However, Salle advised Schnabel against going with Solomon since she already showed many of the Pattern and Design artists who worked with fabrics and might have given people the wrong idea about Schnabel’s intentions. 



Julian Schnabel had his first one-man show in Europe at Gerald Just’s Galerie Dezember in Dusseldorf in 1978, where he showed five of his wax paintings. There was no sales or press coverage, though the German painters Sigmar Polke and Imi Knoebel did attend the opening. He kept sketchbooks with him, which he filled with crude drawings in Biro or oil stick of the land, poplar trees, religious iconography and plans for anthropomorphic sculptures. The pages of the sketchbooks were stained with paint smears, oil blots, tears and splatters – they suggested haste, carelessness and creative recklessness - but they also looked mannered. They might have been inspired - by the delirious paranoid and psychotic drawings of Antonin Artaud - but they lacked any of his authenticity of feeling.

Schnabel visited the 1978, Venice Biennale, but just as an unknown tourist. “There was a heavy cloud of enthusiasm and national pride hovering above the heads of the Italian artists. They were all wearing white linen suits with Campari stains.” (Julian Schnabel, CJV: Nicknames of Maitre D’s & Other Excerpts From Life, New York: Random House, 1987, P. 127.) Schnabel observed the circus of insider artists and outsiders, the ones who were hot and the ones who were not. “Good conversation is scarce and there are so few people who know how to make art. An older artist can nurture and make something bloom in a younger one. It’s more interesting than trying to erase everyone with a glint of talent, so you can imagine you have no competition, that way being a very lonely and miserly way of living in the world. If you are worried about losing your place to somebody who might be more talented than you are, then you have already lost it.” (Julian Schnabel, CJV: Nicknames of Maitre D’s & Other Excerpts From Life, New York: Random House, 1987, P. 127.) Two years later, he would be the star of the show alongside the Germans Baselitz and Kiefer.

Schnabel and Ross Bleckner, went to Barcelona together where they visited the Museu Picasso and saw Antonio Gaudi’s Parc du Guell that was an incredibly joyful mix of sculpted follies encrusted with a mosaic of brightly coloured ceramic. “I thought the columns holding up the playground at Guell Park looked like images of syphilis that I had seen in medical books.” (Julian Schnabel, CJV: Nicknames of Maitre D’s & Other Excerpts From Life, New York: Random House, 1987, P. 145.) It was seeing these that gave Schnabel the idea for his future plate paintings though others would also point to Long Island’s Alfonso Ossorio’s eccentric assemblages. That night they ate at a seafood restaurant and Schnabel came down with food poisoning.


Schnabel went to Madrid alone. He was a gregarious man and could not cope with even the shortest time alone especially in a city he knew no one and did not speak the language. He spent the week downing Valuim, going to see Last Tango in Paris three times in a single day and making notes and sketches in his notebook in his hotel room: “I want my life to be embedded in my work, crushed into my painting, like a pressed car. If it is not, my work is just some sort of stuff. When I'm away from it, I'm crippled. Without my relationship to what may seem like these inanimate objects, I am just an indulgent misfit. If the spirit of being isn’t present in the face of this work, it should be destroyed because it is meaningless. I am not making some things. I am making a synonym for the truth with all its falsehoods, oblique as it is. I am making icons that present life in terms of our death. A bouquet of mistakes.” (Julian Schnabel, CJV: Nicknames of Maitre D’s & Other Excerpts From Life, New York: Random House, 1987, P. 146.)


Back in New York, he had his friend Brooke Larsen built the two armatures which were roughly the same size as the closet in his hotel room in Barcelona – the first seven and a half feet by nine feet and the second seven and a half feet by ten feet. These would be Schnabel’s first two ‘plate’ paintings ‘The Patients and the Doctors’ and ‘Death of Fashion’. He had no intention of creating any more of these “Frankenstein” paintings he “wanted a revelation not a series.” (Julian Schnabel, CJV: Nicknames of Maitre D’s & Other Excerpts From Life, New York: Random House, 1987, P. 157.) Over these wooden panels, he piled bondo, dentist cement, and joint-compound - anything strong enough to the hold broken shards of dinner plates he had bought at the Salvation Army store. “At first the plates didn’t seem to look agitated enough, so I started to throw them around to give them a sense of velocity... Before going to bed, at five in the morning, I stood the painting up. I knew it was too soon but I did it anyway... Lying in the dark, I heard a clink... I feel asleep to the rain of plates.” (Julian Schnabel, CJV: Nicknames of Maitre D’s & Other Excerpts From Life, New York: Random House, 1987, P. 158.) Over these, he painted abstract studies in sculptural form and pseudo-mysticism. The broken surface of Schnabel’s plate-paintings created a ready-made kind of Cubism and a found-object impasto. They were both Expressive and Conceptual exercises in painting. The historian Gert Schiff noted: “All true mosaics have a cohesive, smooth, two-dimensional surface (especially when they are meant to be sat upon.) Hence, the broken tiles used by Gaudi appear flat, like the torn wallpaper in some Cubist collages. In Schnabel’s plate paintings, the shards are put in discontinuously. They protrude, most markedly so, if a fully rounded fragment of a milk-can or teapot is fitted into the plaster. Hence they form a disjunctive relief, with sharp-edged buckling and holes. These pieces of broken crockery can be painted around and thus effect a “surface aggression”, or over and thereby tie the painted shape into the picture plane. One doesn’t perceive these shards as “giant brushstrokes”, but much rather as enlarged pointillist dots: like these latter (which do not coalesce on the beholders retina, not even with Seurat, much less Signac ad Cross) they create a shallow, flickering surface-space, which is at the same time behind, upon and inside the individual shapes.” (Gert Schiff, Julian Schnabel and the Mythology of Feeling, Julian Schnabel, Pace Gallery, 1984.)


In February 1979, he had his first one-man show in the Mary Boone Gallery, New York. Although he had finished two plate paintings, they were not shown. When he exhibited them in his second show at the Mary Boone Gallery late in 1979, they caused a sensation. Amongst the first to eulogize them was Rene Ricard writing for Art in America. No one had ever seen anything like it – it was quite simply the greatest gimmick in the history of painting - proved by the fact that they lead nowhere formally. That was both the reason for their initial success and also their later critical slating. The plate paintings and their curious hybrid quality of painting-cum-sculptural-relief inspired a lot of analysis. Some noted how they demanded to be seen in the flesh and could not be understood in photographic reproduction: “The scale of the plates as they function in terms of the viewer have a curious effect, however when they are reduced for reproduction they look like confetti. In other words they can’t be altered at all without destroying their meaning.” (Rene Ricard, About Julian Schnabel, Julian Schnabel: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1982.) Others noted their primitive quality: “But the significance of Schnabel’s ceramic-shard ground goes beyond fragmentation. Lay one of these paintings down on the ground, rather than hanging it on the wall, and it ceases to be a painting and becomes a sculptural representation of an archaeological site, particularly of Neolithic and bronze age sites which are characterized above all by the massing of broken ceramic shards sticking out of the ground at all angles.” (Thomas McEvilley, The Case of Julian Schnabel, Julian Schnabel: Whitechapel, 1986, P. 15.) In an art-world increasingly dominated by gimmicky signature styles – Schnabel’s stood out like a sore thumb to be pulled by heavyweight collectors like Charles and Doris Saatchi, Peter Ludwig, Michael Ovitz, Philip Johnson, Gerald S. Elliott, Fredrik Roos and Philip Niarchos.


Yet Schnabel’s novel use of plates in his paintings were to prove a conservator’s nightmare: “Yes those heavy plates in Schnabel’s work do pop off with some regularity. Surprised? The conservators aren’t. They report that shoddy stretchers becoming warped and velvet’s becoming worn-looking are fairly common occurrences. “If God wanted Schnabel’s work to last,” says one, “he wouldn’t have invented gravity.” (E. Bingo Wyer, Flaky Art: Modern Masterpieces Are Crumbling, New York Magazine, 25th January 1988, P. 48.)



Just as quickly as Schnabel’s paintings began to gain attention so did his persona - which quickly began to overshadow his art. Promoted like a pop star, charismatic and shamelessly self-important he became a regular feature in the arts press, newspapers, gossip columns and glossy magazines like Vanity Fair and Vogue. When Anthony Haden-Guest met him in 1982 he gushed “Schnabel has somewhat of a Roman profile, and with his marble pale skin and rippling brown hair, lightly oiled, has the bravura of a second century emperor.” (Anthony Haden-Guest, True Colours: The Real Life of the Art World. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press 1996, P. 86.) Yet, cynics giddily reported that the plates in Schnabel’s paintings regularly fell off and he had an assistant whose job it was to repair them. “If God wanted Schnabel’s work to last”, one conservator observed, “he wouldn’t have invented gravity”. (E. Bingo Wyer, Flaky Art: Modern Masterpieces Are Crumbling, New York Magazine, 25th January, 1985, P. 48.) Schnabel did not the fit conventional stereotype of the tortured artist or ascetic intellectual - pictured in tailored suits and loafers covered in paint and holding massive paintbrushes - he looked like a rich stockbroker playing at being Pollock. Tony Godfrey writing in 1985 was willing to give Schnabel the benefit of the doubt saying that Schnabel was “taking over Pollock’s heroic mantle despite all his dilettantism and playboy lifestyle. In his paintings he attempts, like Aeneas, to enter the underworld of the imagination in order to bring back truth.” (Tony Godfrey, The New Image: Painting in The 1980s, New York: Abbeville Press, 1985, P.140.) However, twenty-four years later Godfrey was keener to focus on Schnabel’s charisma to explain his success, “He was good-looking, the darling of a very buoyant art market where artists, dealers and collectors were suddenly all so clever, brave and drop-dead gorgeous.” (Tony Godfrey, Painting Today, London: Phaidon, 2009, P. 65.) It was Schnabel’s guileless self-importance and egotism that led to him becoming such a figure of enmity. Schnabel said that when he need inspiration he said, “I go and look at other people’s paintings and see how shitty they can be.” (Anthony Haden-Guest, True Colours: The Real Life of the Art World. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press 1996, P. 86.) Unwilling to wait for the world to decide if he was a genius, Schnabel announced it for all to hear. Given all the exhibition space and materials possible to make works of genius - he spectacularly failed to deliver. His taste was fundamentally sophomoric and crude so rather than carefully craft his style towards perfection he bludgeoned his way through aesthetic problems relying on blind faith to carry him through.

In April 1980, he met Jacqueline Beaurang a twenty-three-year-old Belgian film stylist. After a ten-day courtship he followed her to Europe en route to the Venice Biennale. He proposed to her in Venice and the pair married in July. Their two daughters Lola Montes and Stella were born in 1981 and 1983 and a son Vito Maria was born in 1986. Stella was to became a poet and actress, Lola a painter and film maker and his son Vito became an art dealer.

Despite his success, Schnabel still liked to throw his weight around with other artists on the rise, like Eric Fischl when they ran into each other at David Salle’s loft, as Fischl remembered in his autobiography: ““I don’t know how you make the paintings you make”. The voice -reedy, plaintive, provocative- belonged unmistakably to Julian Schnabel... “Have you ever seen the blood drying in the corrida?” he shouted at me. “Have you ever walked alone on the beaches where Caravaggio walked?” The short answer was no, but I let him finish his litany. It didn’t take a genius to see what he was getting at. He was saying that I didn’t have authentic feelings, that I hadn’t lived – at least not according to his über-romantic notion of how an artist experiences life – and that until I underwent what in his mind were essential rites of artistic passage, I couldn’t paint”. (Eric Fischl & Michael Stone, Bad Boy: My Life on and Off the Canvas, New York: Crown Publishers, 2012, P. 176-178.) Their mutual friend Ross Bleckner had to defuse the situation. Although initially Schnabel had sent collectors around to buy Fischl’s work, his dislike of Fischl had dated back (according to Fischl) to when Fischl had refused to swap works with Schnabel. Schnabel was to go on to disparage Fischl’s work in CVJ and Fischl for his part, went to great lengths in his own autobiography to set the record straight over twenty-five years later. Fischl was suspicious of Schnabel’s “grandiose personal style – so blustery and nakedly ambitious – it felt like a pose. I didn’t trust it and it influenced the way I looked at his art, which I felt was derivative of European expressionists like Beuys, Gaudí, and especially Tàpies... His work seemed nostalgic for the good old days when men were men and men and painters were men and their paintings, larger than life, were worth fighting over. For Julian, the history of twentieth-century art went something like this: Picasso, Pollock, Schnabel.” (Eric Fischl & Michael Stone’s, Bad Boy: My Life on and Off the Canvas, New York: Crown Publishers, 2012, P. 177.)

Schnabel’s relationship with Salle ended in 1981, the pair had agreed to swap works and Salle first gave Schnabel his diptych Daemonization. Schnabel decided to make it one of his own, by reversing the order of the canvases and painting a crude linear portrait of Salle in clumsy orange paint straight from the tube. The altered canvas was retitled Jump and exhibited as a collaborative canvas at Mary Boone in 1981. Shortly after the pair fell out as they battled for supremacy in the New York art world. When Schnabel wrote his autobiography CVJ in 1987, Salle wasn’t even mentioned, yet at the time, David Salle was considered the far more important painter by art world insiders. 


The dealer Holly Solomon remembered yet another example of Schnabel’s bully ambition: “Bruno Bischofberger had been interested in the work of one of Solman’s stable, Joe Zucker, who had come up with a way of energizing a picture by an accumulation of paint-soaked cotton balls, a technique he had begun working on in 1969. Solomon says she heard Schnabel “bad-mouthing” the work to Bischofberger at an opening. “I went over and said, ‘Keep your fucking mouth shut’,” she says. It was art world politics, she feels: “bully power.” Schnabel is adamant that he never said a word against Zucker. Bischofberg never did follow through on Zucker anyway.” (Anthony Haden-Guest, True Colours: The Real Life of the Art World. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press 1996, P. 111.) Acting like a later day Jackson Pollock, Schnabel also made a habit of threatening to fight other artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jake Chapman if they dared to challenge his authority. 


In 1981, Schnabel met Jasper Johns and invited the older painter to view his work. Looking at Pool Painting for Norma Desmond, John’s said, “It’s very beautiful, but what does it mean?” (Julian Schnabel, CJV: Nicknames of Maitre D’s & Other Excerpts From Life, Random House, New York, 1987, P. 129.) Meanwhile, Rene Ricard wrote Not About Julian Schnabel an essay that featured in Artforum in which Ricard defended his own critical reputation and his friend’s against an increasing tide of rumour, jealousy and criticism.  


In 1981 Leo Castelli the most powerful dealer in New York at the time, agreed to work with Boone to represent Schnabel. “This was a coup de foudre,” Castelli said, “Like when I went to see Jasper in ’57 or Stella in ’59. I went in and saw the clay paintings. And I was just bowelled over.” (Anthony Haden-Guest, True Colours: The Real Life of the Art World. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press 1996, P. 97.) Schnabel had made the big time, “Of course it was an honour to be the first artist that Leo had taken into his gallery in twelve years. But I think this single act of acceptance placed me in the middle of a storm of jealousy and antagonism that has not abated. The controversy has focused attention on me at the expense of my work.” (Julian Schnabel, CJV: Nicknames of Maitre D’s & Other Excerpts From Life, New York: Random House, 1987, P. 185.) Schnabel broke out in a rash before his duel exhibition and even when others like the renowned painter Alex Katz were trying to be nice to him - Schnabel’s ego got in the way, “I remember Alex Katz standing on the sidewalk after my opening at Leo Catelli telling me that it was a very good show, and I said to him: it had to be or I’d kill myself. Then I thought: This guy’s only trying to be nice to you. You can’t just say thanks?” (Julian Schnabel, quoted in Eric Fischl & Michael Stone’s, Bad Boy: My Life on and Off the Canvas, New York: Crown Publishers, 2012, P. 147.) But the show was a major success and most of the paintings had sold before the opening with prices ranging from $9,000 to $40,000. In an odd promotional trick, Boone persuaded Castelli to put the names of those collectors who had bought the works on the captions beside the paintings, encouraging others to snap up the remaining unsold works. Yet many of the figurative canvases Schnabel franticly painted in 1981 trying to ape German Neo-Expressionists were amongst the worst of his entire career – woefully drawn, epileptically painted and big just for the sake of it - exposing his lack of academic skills. 


Peter Schjeldahl gently ribbed Schnabel’s success and self-belief: “Schnabel would be the Francis Ford Coppola of art if one could picture Coppola with all the studio heads, distributors, and other moguls on his side. He is in a state of total success... Schnabel has an attitude to success that is either Byronic or naive. He welcomes it, he has said, because it enables him to do what he wants. That’s a heroic switch on the more usual notion of success as a reward for doing what someone else wants.” (Peter Schjeldahl, The Hydrogen Jukebox, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1991, P. 72-3.) 


However, Schnabel’s egotism went over well with collectors looking for the ‘next-big-thing’ and Schnabel rode the wave of the 1980s art market. Neo-Expressionism was the first sales bonanza since Pop in the early 1960s, and Schnabel became the first American artist since Warhol to achieve not only art world success, but real fame, and infamy. Much of his success was built upon his networking, schmoozing and social climbing as his exhibitions and sales. America needed artists like Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and David Salle to compete with the increasing strength and fashionability of European art, and frankly, I think they held their own. As Schnabel moved into a new studio, Robert Pincus-Witten captured its opulence: “A few months ago, Schnabel moved into a more or less finished working space – sliding panels, bright responsible young assistants, phones ringing, stacks of carpentered stretcher supports, piles of Le Franc oil paint in pound tubes – an incredible dream of luxury, a monument to painterly orality; in brief, the extravagant appurtenances of overwhelming success.” (Robert Pincus-Witten, Julian Schnabel: Blind Faith, Arts Magazine, 1982.) Schnabel was the youngest artist featured in the key international group exhibition A New Spirit in Painting in 1981 in the Royal Academy London which highlighted the resurgence of painting but controversially had no women amongst its thirty-eight chosen painters.  



But Robert Hughes like many critics was bitterly unimpressed by the Schnabel phenomenon: “In a teetering market, Julian Schnabel is hyped... This classic hype was carried out, against the backdrop of a teetering art market, on a scale not seen since the promotion of Bernard Buffet in Paris at about the time Schnabel was born. Schnabel's work is tailor-made to look important. It is all about capital letters Life, Death, the Zeitgeist, and above all the tragic though profitable condition of being a Great Artist... Its imagery is callow and solemn, a Macy's parade of expressionist bric-a-brac: skulls, bullfights, crucifixes, severed heads. It includes portraits of the likes of Baudelaire, Artaud, Burroughs and other connoisseurs of crisis. It serves up, by implication, the image of Schnabel himself as a young Prince of Aquitaine, albeit a Texan one, sleepless with memory and disillusion, contemplating the wrenched spare parts of history... But at least Schnabel does not lack industry: his current exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York is his eighth gallery show in six years. There are two kinds of painting in it: straight and plate. The straight paintings—pigment on canvas—are the weaker and look like nth-generation abstract expressionism, which, in fact, they are... Such work is homage rendered as cliché; but then Schnabel's reputation rests more on his plate paintings, layer on layer of broken crockery combined with things like antlers and twigs and slathered in paint... All that crockery—how could it be a mere response to other art? The broken saucer would be the severed ear of the '80s, spelling emotional hunger, pent-up violence, expressionist authenticity... But of course it is not so. The crockery is a formal device, a rhetorical way of producing the "interesting" surface that, as his straight paintings prove, he cannot sustain by conventional means... In these late days of museum culture, any viewer may exhibit certain Pavlovian responses to thick paint. It connotes sincerity, urgency and a haptic involvement with the world. In so doing, it has become a conventional sign, and Schnabel indicates how conventional it can get. His work is a kind of Pop art, based not on mass media but on coarse generalized fictions of intimacy and expressiveness. Some of its traits seemed, at first, rather daring in their perversity, notably his way of painting over the crust of plates, as though its cracked and riven surface were nothing more than grain. But this, too, exhausts itself. It might not do so if Schnabel were a real draftsman, but his line is maundering, weak and thick... It is pastiche mostly, but who minds that? What the art world wants is a good $30,000 pasticheur...” (Robert Hughes, Expressionist Bric-a-Brac, Time Magazine, 1982.) Hughes became synonymous for Schnabel bashing, though as the reader can see he was not alone in this. However, the feud between the two never ended and even in 2010 when interviewed for 60 Minutes by Morley Safer the mere mention of Robert Hughes put Schnabel in a funk, leading him to call the Australian critic a “bully”. Which made me chuckle at the pot calling the kettle black. Morley Safer dismissed Schnabel as the “poster-boy” for the Me Generation. 


Other critics questioned the authenticity of Schnabel’s expressive paintings too, were they as Peter Schjeldahl asked in “the spirit of van Gogh” or where they in the spirit of “Kirk Douglas as van Gogh in Lust For Life?” (Peter Schjeldahl, Art: The Ardour of Ambition, Village Voice, 23ed February 1982, P. 79)


In 1982, Schnabel began making his first sculptures made from found objects and wood he then had cast in bronze. He called them “toys”. The first exhibition of his sculptures was in the Pace Gallery in New York in 1990. “As bashful as ever, Schnabel looked over his sculptures, compared himself to David Smith, and said thoughtfully: “I can’t think of any other sculptor who holds the ground that well.”” (Anthony Haden-Guest, True Colours: The Real Life of the Art World. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996, P. 191.) The same year Bruno Bischofsberger arranged to have these huge sculptures exhibited outdoors in the snow of Chantarella in the Swiss Alps. Of all his work, Schnabel’s sculptures were the dumbest and my least favourite. Hulking great lumps of bronze in either phallic shapes or vague symbolic formations, they had a kind of brutalist quality I found off-putting. They were clearly the rather uninventive experiments of a painter with delusions he was also a sculptor. After Joseph Beuys’s death in 1986, Schnabel’s sculpture Tomb for Joseph Beuys was shown in the exhibition Beuys zu Ehren at the Lenbachhaus in Munich.
            

Schnabel was featured in the ground-breaking and controversial Zeitgeist group exhibition in Berlin in 1982 which showcased the Neo-Expressionists. In the new musical Cats there was even a pastiche of a Schnabel as a stage prop. In 1982, he also had his first major retrospective of four years of work at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam which caused consternation. The same year he had a solo exhibition at the Tate in London with works owned by the Saatchi’s which was lambasted in the press. The artist and collector fell out and “Schnabel reacted angrily when Saatchi sold several of his works a few years later for $200,000 each. Schnabel said, ‘If this is pruning [his collection], then Saatchi was doing it while wearing a blindfold.’ Schnabel described Art in Our Times volumes as ‘a mail order catalogue’. In 1993, two more Schnabels from Saatchi’s collection were sold at auction in New York for $319,000 each. In 2007, each would have brought $2-3 million.” (Jon Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art. London: Aurum Press 2012, P. 99.) The tide was turning against Schnabel and he was famously excluded by Rudi Fuchs from Dokumenta 7 in Kassel in favour of David Salle. Funnily enough, Fuchs’s was to recant in lengthy terms in an essay to an exhibition of Schnabel’s work in Germany in 2007.


In the spring of 1983, Clement Greenberg visited Schnabel’s show at the Leo Castelli gallery; he proceeded to tell Schnabel what he thought worked and what did not work in his paintings, and what he should take out of them to make them work. “... some people just don’t want to see anything that they don’t expect to see. Rather than being stimulated by a new experience, they want to remove any annoyance that disturbs their preconception of what they think art is; in Greenberg’s case, what he calls taste. He’s saying, I’m an authority because I have good taste. (Let me cut your eyes out and everything will be fine.)” (Julian Schnabel, CJV: Nicknames of Maitre D’s & Other Excerpts From Life, New York: Random House, 1987, P. 142.) 
           

In May 1983, Notre Dame an early plate painting sold in action for $93,000 and €40,000 more than its estimate. Originally it had been planned to sell The Patients and the Doctors which Annina Nosei had bought from Schnabel for $3,500 in 1980. He claimed that she had agreed to offer him first refusal if she ever decided to sell The Patients and the Doctors. So, in compromise, Schnabel gave her Notre Dame which she put up for auction in the place of The Patients and the Doctors. 
             

When in late 1983, Schnabel had an exhibition in the Waddington Galleries, London, it was another scandalous success with many art world insiders coming to pour scorn, like the conservative art critic Peter Fuller (a later founder of the art magazine Modern Painters) who while admitting Schnabel had a flickering of talent wrote that it could not “… cover up the fact that he is a painter with the imagination of a retarded adolescent; no technical mastery; no intuitive feeling for pictorial space; no sensitivity towards, or grasp of tradition; and a colour sense rather less developed than that of Congo, the chimpanzee who was taught (among other things) a crude responsiveness to colour harmonies by Desmond Morris in the late 1950s.” (Peter Fuller, Art Monthly, February 1984, P. 19.) 


During the filming of the documentary A New Spirit in Painting: 6 Painters of the 1980’s, Schnabel worked on his plate-painting Red Sky from 1984 which was based on the sepia ink drawing He Fell into the Trap by Francisco de Goya of a man being tortured on a rack. Schnabel was painting it at a time when many in the artistic community in New York were outraged by American support for the right-wing military government in El Salvador that was brutalising its citizens and torturing dissidents and the US funding of the right-wing Contra rebels against the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. But clearly, Schnabel did not share other artists belief in the power of art to change things politically. Because he observed: “And I don’t think that the meaning of this painting is the description of this act of torture that is being described in the painting. I’m not making this painting for all of the people in El Salvador that are being tortured.” (Julian Schnabel interviewed while painting Red Sky from 1984, A New Spirit in Painting: 6 Painters of the 1980’s, Michael Blackwood Productions, 1984.) For Schnabel and most of the other Princes of Neo-Expressionist painting - art was blithely above politics and the troubles of the real world - lost in a privileged dream world of solipsistic paint and art market conformity and unrivalled success.   


When Schnabel finished with Mary Boone and Leo Castelli and moved to the Pace Gallery it was reported widely in the press like he was a rock musician breaking up with the record label that had discovered him. According to Ross Bleckner, Schnabel’s move to the Pace Gallery had been prompted by Mary Boone taking on Eric Fischl. Schnabel felt he had made the Mary Boone gallery and was angered that other talents like his nemesis Fischl were benefiting from it. At Eric Fischl’s exhibition in the Mary Boone Gallery in 1984, Schnabel mockingly posed bare-chested with Tod Wizon, Markus Lüpertz and Jörg Immendorff in front of Eric Fischl’s canvas Cargo Cults. “The point he was trying to make, I think, was that Eric’s painting was just scenery”, recalled Mary Boone. (Mary Boone, quoted in Eric Fischl & Michael Stone’s, Bad Boy: My Life on and Off the Canvas, New York: Crown Publishers, 2012, P. 209.) At the end of 1984, when Grace Glueck wrote in the New York Times about the “the great booming art world of today” she quoted Leo Castelli, Schnabel’s ex-dealer who said: “But he wanted to be King Kong; he’s arrogant and imbued with self-importance. He felt that at Mary’s and my gallery the competition from others was too strong… I don’t want to see him again.” 

Schnabel became known for painting in silk pyjamas, socializing with movie stars, being photographed by Helmut Newton, his Bentley and Long Island Hampton home with outdoor studio and tennis gardens. Following the likes of Edvard Munch and Jackson Pollock, Schnabel became fond of painting his huge canvases out of doors, letting the wind and rain effect the patina of his canvases. Art world socialites like Francesca Thyssen swooned, “... a shivering SCHNABEL unveiled his latest portrait on velvet of one of St Moriz’s most illustrious citizens. It was so large it did not fit indoors so JULIAN painted the complete painting outdoors at -20 centigrade. We were all thrilled and chilled.” (Francesca Thyssen quoted in Tony Godfrey’s Painting Today, London: Phaidon, 2009, P. 68.) In the 1980s artists were the new Rock and Roll stars – followed in the gossip columns, courted by the rich, friends to the famous stars of the music world and Hollywood. Despite his many critics’ best efforts, by 1984, Schnabel was riding the crest of the wave, his income approached a million dollars a year. In the February 1984 edition of Artforum, Schnabel presented a rambling freeform passive aggressive poem called The Patients and the Doctors, in which he boasted of his success, attacked his critics and claimed his fortune had not affected the seriousness of his art. “I have two little girls and a beautiful and intelligent wife, / people are buying my paintings, / people are writing about me; / people will write about anything - / people are writing about people buying my paintings. / I can go where I want, /eat whatever I like, /make a pig of myself – /and will continue to do so as long as I’ve got money. / As you all must know by now / I am a “success” (conditionally.) / If you think that I am satiated, not hungry anymore, / that’s what your morality is. /A chemical need, like displaced love, / is not a profession. Not a career. Not a choice. / I don’t matter. What I have to show you does.” (Julian Schnabel, The Patients and The Doctors, Artforum, February 1984.) 
             

One underestimated skill Schnabel had was his ability to make bull-shitting a high-art. He could tell whole stories and quote various sources to eulogize over a particular canvas that was little more than a lot of flung paint and some awkward writing. 
             

 As Andy Warhol wittily recorded in his diaries: “Tuesday, December 16, 1986. I was picked up by Tony and had to go to Schnabel’s. He drove me to West 11th Street, to his huge studio. So huge. And a balcony and a roof. And he has beautiful girl secretaries answering the phone and I asked him if Jacqueline got jealous and he said, ‘You have to have beautiful boys and girls working for you.’ He’s still making his plate paintings so I guess that’s what’s selling... And he’s painting over beautiful Japanese backgrounds and ruining them. And he’s got tarpaulins with words glued on them and he says, ‘these are from my San Salvadorean exposition.’ It was the most pretentious afternoon I’ve ever had. And I left there completely convinced I should buy a Schnabel.” (Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries, Edited by Pat Hackett, London: Pan Books 1992, P.993.) In fact, Warhol’s bitchy diaries give a good pen portrait of the young Schnabel as he tried to take over the New York art world. Warhol, portrays Schnabel as a purveyor of bad painting, always on the make, copying other artists at will and shoomizing with wealthy collectors. However, although Warhol did not love Schnabel the way he did Jean-Michel Basquiat he clearly had time for him and recognised his immense ambition. 


Those involved in the promotion of Schnabel, often did him as much damage, in their uncritical hyping of him, “Schnabel then becomes, like the poet Antonin Artaud whom he invokes so often in his painting and his writings, the ultimate existential hero, the hero who snatches life from the jaws of madness and death. That Schnabel sees himself as this kind of hero/martyr can be discerned not only from the writings but from the paintings themselves: the flayed torsos and impaled saints of the early work... Schnabel is the slave to his art, the martyr to his art, the artist who can only find in his creation refuge from the ultimate. And it is this awareness – that consciousness is the only hope – that he offers his audience... Despite his self-consciousness, his rhetorical aspect as Kuspit would have it, there is finally little distance or irony in Schnabel’s work. This leaves him as the last in a long line of Modernist martyr/heros – Goya, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Pollock and Beuys – who sought to wrestle life from the awareness of death.” (Russell Bowman, Currents 10: Julian Schnabel, Milwaukee Art Museum, 1987, P.5.) Schnabel was many things - but a martyr to his art he was not. He had profited more from art than most in art history and done so with the help of assistants, eager dealers and a willing public. To compare the brutalised hell inflected by psychiatrists on Artaud and the even greater intellectual deconstruction he inflicted upon himself to the wined and dined Schnabel was a gross travesty of meaning. 


Although one of the most talked about and hyped members of the Neo-Expressionist movement, seeing its day was done Schnabel distanced himself from it in the late 1980s: “For me art isn’t about self-expression. Painting your guts out has never been an interesting idea or made an interesting painting. Feeling cannot be separated from intellect. In that sense, Neo-Expressionism doesn’t exist; it never has. It’s one of those terms that journalists invent for each other... Everything has existed before. For me there’s no achievement in making a graphic description of myself, my personality, on canvas. Using used things, things we all recognize, is in direct conflict with the idea of building your own specific, original signature that will isolate the image you make from all others. Using already existing materials establishes an ethnographic level in the work; it brings a real place and time into the esthetic reality... The specialness of this art is not about some solipsistic, irreducible emblem. It is about the power to take ordinary things, and by arranging them, to produce a transcendence of their ordinariness.” (Julian Schnabel, CJV: Nicknames of Maitre D’s & Other Excerpts From Life, New York: Random House, 1987, P. 205-206.)


In the autumn of 1986, Schnabel’s exhibited at The Pace Gallery a series of paintings on top of Kabuki theatre backdrops, for some like Roberta Smith writing for The New York Times they were his strongest paintings in years, yet others like Kim Levin critic with The Village Voice remained unimpressed: “These new paintings are about looking, not thinking; seeing, not feeling. And yet they’re evocative. They indicate rather than describe. They carry remnants symbolic of grand themes – death, birth, sex and war – but also mean nothing at all. But why should everything mean something? What’s wrong with a taste of true meaninglessness? Schnabel’s paintings are enormous (the smallest roughly twelve feet square) and operatic. His gestures, crude and at the same time precious, can suggest that he’s grinding his soul the way Motherwell does (the elegiac Spanish titles suggest that connection, too). Demented but not demonic, his images and forms can be accused of being flabby, inflated, cast onto their readymade backgrounds like beached whales. And yet they’re not uninteresting. They regurgitate residues of feelings that no longer exist. They manage to be decadent and barbaric at the same time.” (Kim Levin, Julian Schnabel: Zeitgeist or Poltergeist, Beyond Modernism: essays on art from the 70s and 80s, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988, P. 224.)


It was telling that in Wall Street, Oliver Stone’s satire on the greed and bad taste of 1980s one of Schnabel’s plate paintings sat propped up in the newly designer-distressed apartment of young broker Bud Fox. Though to feature the painting, Stone had to buy it and another painting off Schnabel. Meanwhile Schnabel’s rambling and unstructured autobiography CVJ: Nicknames of Maitre D’s & Other Excerpts from Life - which he said was a cross between Charles Dickens and Gertrude Stein - came out in the same year as his major retrospective at The Whitney Museum in New York at the age of thirty-six! CVJ, prompted Robert Hughes to once again take to print to attack Schnabel in one of the most devastating critiques in art history which started out with Hughes having himself removed from Schnabel’s autobiography! Later Hughes famously wrote, “Schnabel’s work is to painting what Stallone’s is to acting – a lurching display of oil pectorals – except that Schnabel makes bigger public claims for himself”. (Robert Hughes, Julian Schnabel, Nothing if Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, P. 303.) In fact, it was these two events and their critical panning that marked the turning point in Schnabel’s artistic career. After the Whitney exhibition Schnabel was not to have another museum retrospective in the U.S. until 2014 - and most critics ignored his work. In the English newspapers, critics from William Feaver, Andrew Graham-Dixon, and Brian Sewell all panned Schnabel’s exhibitions. Only Richard Cork and Waldemar Januszczak had any positive things to say about the brash American. In fact, in England, much of the hostility towards Schnabel was tainted by snobbery, nationalistic bigotry, and resentment towards decades of American dominance in contemporary art. Meanwhile, as of 2010, M.O.M.A. owed only two prints and a drawing by Schnabel, but not a single painting, yet it had many works by far less significance or talented artists who did not come with the celebrity baggage of Schnabel. In an abandoned BBC film about Schnabel in 2003, Kurt Varnedoe one-time chief curator in M.O.M.A. was unimpressed by Schnabel’s work calling them, “fake gestures, easy roads to a kind of empty grandeur.” (Mick Brown, Julian Schnabel: Larging It, The Telegraph, January 19th 2008.) Yet, despite his critical lambasting his work still performed well at auction, in 1992 for example, a number of his canvases came up for action at Christies and Sotheby’s a couple failed to sell though Bob’s World a early plate painting sold for $319,000 and Maria Callas No. 4 an oil painting on velvet sold for the same price and $40,000 above its estimate. Moreover, by 1992, a freshly painted eight by ten-foot canvas by Schnabel would sell according to Bruno Bischofberger for $150,000 and Schnabel was painting as many as thirty-six huge canvases a year. 
         

Sadly, by 1987, Schnabel’s marriage to Jacqueline was in tatters. At times Schnabel was on the verge of suicide at the thought of losing her. However, Jacqueline could not live anymore with his overpowering generosity, the drama surrounding his art and life, the critics, the hangers on and her own diminished role. The pair amicably parted remaining best friends. After his breakup with Jacqueline, Schnabel moved to Palm Beach where he painted out of doors and kept a low profile for over three years. For a few years Schnabel dated Anh Duong a Paris based fashion model who was to become a facile painter of narcissistic self-portraits that weakly pastiched Egon Schiele and Francesco Clemente.

In the 1990s Schnabel’s paintings became more consistent, personal, and lyrical. After decades of restless extermination when his canvases changed style almost weekly, his paintings began to settle down to a simplified style of expressively manipulated, poured, dripped, and flung paint combined with words relating to his personal life, friendships, and lovers. The major influence on Schnabel’s work was Cy Twombly, but where Twombly’s scribbles were grounded on a white canvas ground edited with white oil paint and always had an intellectual look, Schnabel’s scribbles of paint were meaty, emotional and on more varied and coloured surfaces like weathered tarpaulin. These mid-career canvases also echoed early spiritualist abstract masters like Kandinsky and playful Surrealist masters like Juan Miró. Schnabel’s strongest work of this decade, were his abstract tarpaulins in with he recorded his new lover and soon to be second wife Olatz a Basque model and the passing of friends like Paolo Malfi his Italian assistant. 


Most of Schnabel’s late work was abstract and often could be little more than a few slashes of paint and a word or two. Much of his early figurative work was based upon older artistic images while his later portraits were painted from life. In his later paintings, Schnabel often painted with his hands, poured resin on the canvas, and frequently finished ten-foot canvases in less than an hour. 


Schnabel’s expressiveness was Post-Modern in its pastiche, quotation and collaging of visual codes of feeling. Thus, it lacked the genuine intensity of real Expressionist painting of 1905 or Abstract-Expressionist painting of 1945. Julian Schnabel shamelessly stole images from Caravaggio, Artaud, Beckman, Kokoschka, El Greco, Goya to name just seven glaring examples and he greedily copied the abstract styles of Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly, Antoni Tàpies and Sigmar Polke. Schnabel’s assemblages of plates, antlers and sticks unto his paintings – also borrowed from Rauschenberg’s ‘Combine Paintings’ of the mid-1950s and Schnabel’s affixing of objects to his canvases went back to Jasper John. “... Schnabel’s own personal sign and symbols are invariably joined by borrowings from every possible source in high art, low art, and non-art. One must have seen the billboard which forms part of Schnabel’s open-air studio. On it, pinned and pasted and exposed to the elements, hang clippings from German pre-WWI magazines; reproductions of details from Goya’s Black Paintings; Mexican playing cards; illustrations of racial types from an old ethnographical publication; turn of the century advertisements; a line engraving from a nineteenth century tract on mythology; a nude from a physique magazine; devotional pictures; a depiction of tephillim; old postcards and heaven knows what other grist for his omnivorous mill. When incorporated into Schnabel’s paintings, such images stand out like glyphs preserved intact on a weathered, overgrown tablet, allowing the beholder to divine at least part of the runic text.” (Gert Schiff, Julian Schnabel and the Mythology of Feeling, Julian Schnabel, Pace Gallery, 1984.) Schnabel claimed that he painted on the plates and then other surfaces like velvet, military truck tarpaulin, boxing rings, animal hide, silk, sackcloth, antlers, Kabuki sets, sails, wood, aluminium, rugs, and God knows what else - to challenge his facility – to make the drawing of his work that much harder. It was utter nonsense – Schnabel could not draw in the conventional sense. But it was typical of his self-love and blind faith in himself that he prized his awkward crude drawings over those of more conventionally skilled artists. That was where his problems with the critics really began – he had a big mouth. Some of the things Schnabel said of himself were jaw droopingly narcissistic, egotistical, and naïve. Take for example: “I am as close to Picasso as you’re going to get in this f___ing life… Everyone wants to be the greatest in their life, but only one person can be that.” (Michael Stone, Off The Canvas, New York Magazine, 1992.) Or the interview with Grace Glueck in The New York Times, when he claimed his only real peers were Duccio, Giotto, and van Gogh! Don’t fool yourself - many artists with not even a toenail clipping of Schnabel’s talent think the same of themselves – but few have the oafish stupidity to say it in public, sober and to a member of the press. In fact, the only people in public life who talk about themselves in this way are Boxers or UFC Fighters. With fighters, it is excusable. No one lacking self-confidence should ever step in a Ring or an Octagon! But the art world is not an Octagon (even though many artists delude themselves that they are fighters) it is more like a tea party in Pride and Prejudice – filled with greedy, fearful, obsequious queens who don’t take kindly to displays of egotism.


Schnabel’s drawing style was crude, amateurish and sluggish. His paintings were bombastic, manic, and overpowering, and his symbolism was pompous, confused and solipsistic. Overall, one had the impression of an adolescent tantrum of emotion and narcissistic projection. He mixed so many different references within the same canvas – as in paintings like Prehistory: Glory, Honour, Privilege, Poverty, 1981 that the viewer had no real sense of what it all meant – but it was all very Post-Modern indeed. Then on top of the range of images in works like this, there was the egregious quality of its painterliness: “The paint on the fur on Pre-History is disgusting, like slime on the bottom of a slow-moving stream. The quality of the paint is physically gratifying, and outside the realm of formal consideration. The pleasure the viewer takes in the shimmery passages of The Geography Lesson cannot be explained. It shimmers the way no paint has ever shimmered before and it’s just paint on velvet.” (Rene Ricard, About Julian Schnabel, Julian Schnabel: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1982.)


Then there were paintings like Portrait of God, 1981 (from his Mutant King series) - in which he had seen fit, only to scrub on in ultramarine blue, an anthropomorphic shape reminiscent of a slug with a rake on its head and perched on a cross. Works like these left the viewer gobsmacked, at his arrogant assumption that this added up to a significant theological statement. Such works were viewed sceptically by Marxist and moralist critics like Suzi Gablik,”... the florid blue blob that constitutes Schnabel’s portrait of God is like light transmitted through an opaque stone. Seen through the eyes of a spirituality that belongs to another state of culture than ours, it appears to have no depth to its spiritual consciousness – there seems more self-indulgence in it than visionary affirmation... Schnabel, it would seem, has no particular feelings about God one way or the other – it is just another image to manipulate.” (Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed?, Thames and Hudson, 1984, P. 90.) Gablik went on to pour scorn on Schnabel’s spiritual pretensions “... it is difficult to believe in the prophetic consciousness of someone so frankly out to get what he wants – personal success in the New York art world, not metaphysical truths.” (Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed?, London: Thames & Hudson, 1995, P.97.) Other titles like Circumnavigating the Sea of Shit and A Motherfucker were surly meant to goad the conventional art lover. In fact, it was Schnabel who later surely influenced Damien Hirst to give his very different sculptural yBa works such as tiger-sharks or dead cows in formaldehyde - such outlandish titles.


Then there were Schnabel’s lush and gaudy paintings on velvet like The Unexpected Death of Blinky Palermo in The Tropics 1981 in which his oil and modelling paste was brushed on with hectic and clumsy speed – the paint sinking into the velvet in parts and sticking out in lumps in others creating an ethereal and theatrical effect. “Schnabel’s introduction of different-coloured velvet as support was as consequential for his art as his use of broken crockery. For velvet’s light absorbing capacity creates an indefinite depth... Thin oil paint is soaked off by the velvet and thus makes the lineaments recede behind the picture plane, whereas opaque oils or aluminium paint seem to hover in front of it, an effect sometimes countered by the application of powered marble paste. Self-shining velvet imbues the oils with a shimmer they cannot obtain on any other ground. According to their degree of saturation, oil colours can attain a faint glimmer, a soft radiance or a brilliant luminosity; aluminium paint and modelling paste have a hard glare all their own. These varying degrees of shimmer lend themselves to the creation of “transparencies”, or superimpositions of several layers of (often conflicting) visual information.” (Gert Schiff, Julian Schnabel and the Mythology of Feeling, Julian Schnabel: The Pace Gallery, 1984.)

Despite the likes of Arthur C. Danto regarding Schnabel’s paintings on velvet to be “the one witty and allusive feature of his work, a nose thumb at his pushy clientele and an acknowledgement of the crass structures of the art world”, (Arthur C. Danto, The State of The Art, New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1987, P.44.), I considered them a natural extension of Schnabel’s exploration of different surfaces to paint on and often resulted in his most interesting and lush painterly works.

In 1985, Schnabel started incorporating the initials of words in his paintings, then in 1986 he began incorporating words and by 1989 he was including whole sentences into his work. With The Recognition Paintings, Schnabel stripped his art back to its bare bones – fragments of words, painted in white gesso (usually only the primer base coat of a conventional painting) upon worn and stained military tarpaulins. The series was inspired by the William Gaddis’s novel of the same name, which dealt with the life of a forger and explored the nature of influence in art.


Sometimes, an art works’ symbolism hints at something greater, but with Schnabel it often pointed to something more obvious and mundane. Like the letters JB written on a nautical map in black oil paint on his work on paper ‘Letter to My Wife II’, which left me perplexed until I realised they were just the initials of his wife Jacqueline Beaurang. It was just a pretentious form of love heart. 

Compared to the overwrought nature of his early paintings, Schnabel’s drawings had a disarming sparseness. This minimal approach to picture making was one that Schnabel worked at: “... if by putting lines on it, it makes it look smaller – I usually stop. If I put more elements in something and it makes it smaller, I will take the elements out. Whether it be a drawing or a painting, I will usually try to put in as much as possible. But once it starts to make the thing seem like it’s getting smaller, I know that it’s going in the wrong direction.” (Julian Schnabel in Conversation with Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel: Works on Paper 1976-1992, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, 1993). Although smaller than his canvases they were improbably large drawings by conventional standards – some as big as seven feet by five feet – as large as many academic masterpieces. He also played with their perceived importance by putting nonchalantly scribbled drawings into ornate antique frames meant for seventeenth century oil paintings. In reproduction, Schnabel’s drawings looked disarmingly small and inconsequential, only a reading of the size of the work gave away their true grandiosity of scale. Talking about the scale of his drawings Schnabel said: “I like little drawings, but I think a nice scale for drawing is the size of my own body, something I could spread my arms around and something that’s an anthropomorphic size.” (Julian Schnabel in Conversation with Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel: Works on Paper 1976-1992, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, 1993.)


Schnabel’s oil on unprimed paper works were a continuation of his unorthodox habit of painting on unusual surfaces regardless of their long-term stability. Plenty of painters had painted on paper since at least the early nineteenth century, but usually they primed the paper with gesso to protect the paper from rotting from the oxidising oil paint. In the late twentieth century though, artists like Joseph Beuys had made a virtue of painting on unprimed paper and prized the halo effect that oils on paper acquired.

Schnabel’s early drawings and works on paper were influenced by Beuys, the ink blots of Victor Hugo, the exorcisms on paper of Antonin Artaud and the painterly grammar of the Ab-Ex’s but where they had favoured black and white for their works on paper, Schnabel favoured mauves and purples for his gestural swipes of paint. Schnabel’s later works were more indebted to Robert Motherwell and Cy Twombly. In his drawings, he pursued tricks like - drawing out of doors in brush and ink on watercolour paper while it rained. Other times he painted crude abstract shapes over maps of Italy influenced by map paintings he had seen Michael Tracey make, as years later Schnabel admitted, “Basically, I really stole that whole notion from Michael Tracey, and like Jean-Michel Basquiat said, I made my own version of it”. (Julian Schnabel quoted by David Moos, Julian Schnabel: Navigation Drawings, New York: Sperone Westwater, 2008.) Writing about a giant black and white painting based on a self-portrait drawing by Antonin Artaud, Rene Ricard wrote: “Artaud is basically an ink-drawing, but it is an ink drawing that is fourteen feet high. We’re also talking about one hell of a big brush.” (Rene Ricard, About Julian Schnabel, Julian Schnabel: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1982.)


 In the late 1990s, Schnabel could count the likes of Cy Twombly, Denis Hopper and Elton John as friends. Later his daughter dated the lead guitarist of the multi-million selling Indi band - The Red Hot Chilli Peppers. In fact, Schnabel designed the cover for one of their albums. In 1995, Schnabel recorded his own album Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud with musicians Bill Laswell, Bernie Worrell, Buckethead and Nicky Skopelitis.

However, by the mid-1990s, Schnabel had infuriated so many in the New York art world that even the mild-mannered Peter Schjeldahl was moved to break a fourteen-year silence on Schnabel - and declare his loathing for him and his art - on the occasion of Schnabel’s exhibition The Conversion of St. Paolo Malfi in the Pace Gallery. In a rare hatchet job, Schjeldahl started by confessing that: “Schnabel and I did not hit it off personally. The last of our few conversations ended with him shouting angrily in my face, “What you don’t understand, Schjeldahl, is that I have a sense of humour!”” Schjeldahl went on to attack Schnabel’s artistic character: “…Schnabel’s thematic and poetic taste, the domain of what art is supposed to be about, is aggressively awful: puerile, bombastic, maudlin, banal - judgemental words that would annihilate an artist less thick-skinned.” As for Schnabel’s vast paintings commemorating his assistant who had died in a car accident near Rome the year before, Schjeldahl had undisguised contempt: “The prospect of being thus narcissistically mooned over posthumously should lend death a new terror for anyone in the painter’s circle.” (Peter Schjeldahl, Suffering Schnabel, Village Voice, 5th March 1996, P. 63.) 


Later in 1997, Schnabel wrote, produced and directed Basquiat – a moving but romanticized version of the life of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Many artists who knew the pair were surprised by Schnabel’s decision to make a film on Basquiat, who they had never thought were particularly close. Since the controlling Basquiat estate stopped the use of Basquiat’s work in the film - Schnabel and his assistants made their own versions of Basquiat’s work which were an odd mix of Basquiat light - with a hint of Schnabel. As a historical film, it was highly flawed and fictionalized. The appearance of ‘Milo’ a character clearly based on Schnabel and using his paintings prominently in the background, seemed to me to be an outrageous attempt on Schnabel’s part to lash his drowning life-raft - to the soaring reputation of Basquiat, who had made the smart move to die two years before the collapse of the 80s art market. Nevertheless, despite its mawkish retelling of Basquiat’s life – I loved this film very much and watched it at least two dozen times.

Afterwards, Schnabel went on to direct three more critically acclaimed films Before Night Falls, which told the story of gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. Before Night Falls won the grand jury prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2000. It stared Javier Bardem, who won an Academy Award for his role as well as a Golden Globe nomination. I thought Before Night Falls was a far superior film to Basquiat, however I much preferred the story of Basquiat’s life for obvious reasons. Schnabel followed this with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly based on the memoir of Jean-Dominique Bauby who had suffered a massive stroke and suffered from ‘locked in syndrome’ where he could not move or speak and had to communicate by blinking his eye. Schnabel made the film after his father Jack had died from cancer after years staying alive to care for his ailing wife Esther who died in 2002. Schnabel said The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was his personal attempt to come to terms with death and the meaning of art in relation to it. “I tried to put myself in my father’s body so I could die with him, and be reborn and still be alive.” (Mick Brown, Julian Schnabel: Larging It, The Telegraph, 19th January 2008.) The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was nominated for four Oscars. Personally, I thought it was Schnabel’s greatest film and his most thought provoking, moving and inspiring. His most recent film Miral (2011) his first non biopic was based on the novel by Rula Jebreal – for whom he was to leave his wife Olatz Lopez Garmendia. It stared Freida Pinto, and told the story of four Palestinian women growing up in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war. The film received mixed reviews and personally I agreed with its detractors. For me, Miral was the worst film Schnabel had ever made - a schizophrenic and pretentious mess that failed on every level as a film and as a plea for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. After the flop of Miral, Schnabel and Rula Jebreal broke up after four years together and Schnabel then entered a relationship with May Andersen a former Victoria Secret model and director at the Hole Gallery. The pair had a son called Shooter in August 2013. 


Late in 2018, Schnabel released his fifth film Eternity’s Gate about the last two years of van Gogh’s life - which I saw at the end of March 2019. I did not think it was that great a film, though it did have some brilliant moments - much like Schnabel’s art. Apart from Willem Defoe’s excellent performance as van Gogh, I thought the rest of the actors were subpar. I found Oscar Isaac’s simpering performance as the sinister Paul Gauguin totally unconvincing. I did think the film portrayed van Gogh’s mental illness quite well and hinted at the accusations by the people of Arles that van Gogh had been harassing the women in the town. However, At Eternity’s Gate only inferred about van Gogh’s dire failure with women who were terrified and repulsed by him or his guttural use of prostitutes and never showed van Gogh’s many acts of emotional blackmail, self-harm or rage. So, the infamous act of cutting off his ear was never shown - though Schnabel correctly suggested that most of the ear had been cut off. Meanwhile, I found the constant use of handheld cameras in At Eternity’s Gate pretentious and dizzying - though I did get used to it. What I did not get used to, were the endless shots of van Gogh walking through the landscape. Of course, van Gogh did a lot of walking - but it became tiresome to watch. I also had to laugh, when at the start of the film Willem Defoe was seen painting a pair of boots - except it was not in the style of the supreme van Gogh - but in the style of the Neo-Expressionist Schnabel with all his crudeness and lack of integrity. Then there were the endless conversations between van Gogh and an uncomprehending world which were a strange melange of van Gogh’s actual words in his letters and Schnabel’s own fanciful ideas. More seriously, I found At Eternity’s Gate’s many gross historical inaccuracies aggravating, especially when at the end of the film Schnabel used the spurious conspiracy theory that van Gogh had not shot himself out of existential despair - but had been shot by young kids. This theory completely destroyed the existential meaning of van Gogh’s life and lied about his tragic ending. It also reminded me of those who loved people who had committed suicide and claimed their death was my “misadventure”. It was typical of the way normal people tried to downplay the tragic alienation of those they loved to ease their guilty conscious and make life easier for themselves. Almost as bad was Schnabel’s choice to make a sketchbook of supposed van Gogh drawings found in 2016 a central part of the film - even though most experts and I thought the sketchbook was a fake. Yet again, as a lover of history - which was actually often stranger and far more compelling than fiction - I despaired at the wilful lies of film makers who wanted to insert their own bizarre ideas and personality into plots. Frankly, I thought the definitive van Gogh biography or film had never been made and although art world insiders liked to snigger at the Hollywood melodrama of Lust for Life - it was actually the most accurate depiction of van Gogh’s life to date. In summation, At Eternity’s Gate was a fake Vincent van Gogh aimed at rich liberals who could not accept the fact that one of the greatest and most beloved artists who ever lived was a quarrelsome, anti-social lunatic - just like many of the mentally ill homeless people they ignored on the street - on their way to the museums. And although they worshiped van Gogh’s art - they would never really have wished to have him as a guest at one of their smug dinner parties.

In 1997, Schnabel made a rare return to figurative painting on plane canvas, with a series of pseudo-Velázquez looking portraits in squirming oil paint over a venetian red ground. Over these clumsy and unresolved portraits, he poured resin and painted white enamel biomorphic shapes in a manner that echoed Francis Bacon’s use of similar visual interference. They were almost universally panned and would have had every painterly-painter from Velázquez to Sargent turning in their graves.

Meanwhile, even critics like Hilton Kramer who and initially praised Schnabel in the early 1980s had changed their mind and Kramer regreted hs own contribution to Schnabel’s success. Kramer compared Schnabel’s career with Giovanni Boldini who had such a success in the early years of the twentieth century with flashy portraits but had soon been forgotten.

In 2002, the Oscar winning documentary film maker Vikram Jayanti spent three weeks filming a documentary on Schnabel for the BBC titled Julian Schnabel Looks at Hell. Jayanti filmed Schnabel as he painted his Big Girl paintings a series of huge versions of a painting of a girl by an anonymous painter Julian had found in a junk shop. Schnabel turned this small canvas into huge crude copies that he painted with his hands and in which the eyes of the girl were obscured by a swipe of paint. Schnabel became unhappy with the documentary and wanted to edit it himself. When Jayanti refused the documentary was terminated. It has never been aired. Jayanti said, “I think the way I filmed him was truthful, but it shows a heaviness of spirit in him that he doesn’t want to face... he wanted something over which he had the control to create a hagiography that didn’t look like a hagiography.” (Mick Brown, Julian Schnabel: Larging It, The Telegraph, January 19th 2008.)

In the noughties, Schnabel took up photography - making evocative Polaroid’s. Typical of Schnabel, the Polaroid camera he used was one of the largest in existence allowing him to produce huge one-off Polaroid’s which were as unique as a painting in an age of digital photography with its endless capacity for reproduction yet without a unique physical presence. The massive handmade 20” x 24” Polaroid Land camera from the 1970s Schnabel used, was one of only six in existence, and due to its ungainly size had been intended for studio use only. It produced unique images in colour, black and white and sepia that were both photographs and prints in one. Despite its cumbersome size, Schnabel became adept at using it outdoors and to record his paintings in exhibitions. Schnabel’s Polaroid’s featured his family including his father, his two daughters Lola and Stella from his marriage to his first wife Jacqueline Beaurang, his second wife Olatz Lopez Garmendia and their twin sons Olmo Luis and Cy Juan as well as his long-time assistant Brian Kelly. Schnabel also took photographs of friends and celebrities like Lou Reed, Mickey Rourke, Placido Domingo, Max von Sydow and hip-hop group Beastie Boys member Adam Horovitz. The resulting stylish photographs were evocative of a bygone era despite their contemporary subjects. Strangely, like Schnabel’s paintings they were Post-Modern in their conscious pastiche of early 19th century photography like Nadar’s and their tasteful High-Art kitsch look - that seduced but failed to convince.

Also in the noughties, Schnabel branched out into architecture and hotel decoration. He built the Palazzo Chupi a Venetian style apartment block on top of the twentieth century factory building he had lived in and used as a studio since 1987. Adding nine floors on top of the pre-existing six-story factory building in a shade of red found in Pompeii - its building caused controversy amongst Greenwich Village residents. Schnabel designed every detail of this gesamtkunstwerk from the beds to the fireplaces and decorated it with his own art and works by friends.  Onetime editor of Artforum Ingrid Sischy described it as “a timeless masterpiece” and “a perfect expression of Schnabel’s Life”. In addition, Schnabel worked with his friend Ian Schrager to luxuriously renovate and decorate the Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan where a number of his canvases graced the walls alongside works by Picasso and Twombly.

The exception to Schnabel’s later period of slack and superficial canvases were the Untitled (Chinese) paintings of 2009. His use of a photographic based ground saved him from actually drawing or painting figuratively - and the drippy phthalo blue additions he made possessed real painterly drama. However, many of Schnabel’s late ‘paintings’ were nothing but huge expensive prints on canvas of generic and uninteresting photographs with splashes of paint on them. As I joked to my second girlfriend, “imagine having the money to take any old photograph and get someone to blow it up on a huge canvas and then throw some paint at it and call it a painting!”

Today, the prices for Schnabel’s plate paintings at auction are three times that of his more conventional works on velvet or tarpaulin. Though, as I have mentioned, Schnabel’s work on velvet were some of my personal favourites. According to Artprice.com in 2013 sales of Schnabel’s work at auction totalled $2,127,819 and he was ranked 667 in a list of the top 1,000 artists at auction. A search for Julian Schnabel on Google on 31st January 2017, brought up about 542,000 results. Schnabel’s net worth circa 2017 was $25 million.


Ironically, Schnabel by the noughties had become the secret influence on a whole new generation of Zombie Formalist painters like Oscar Murillo and Joe Bradley who shamelessly pastiched the pasticher to unbelievable success, proving true what William Gaddis had written in a catalogue to a Schnabel exhibition in 1999, “We are living today in the market driven age of information predicted by Walter Benjamin, in which art is produced to be imitated, and where frequently enough we remember who did it last rather than who did it first.” (William Gaddis, Julian Schnabel: New Paintings, Paris: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 1999.) Perversely, the efforts of these pathetic Zombie Formalists proved that Schnabel’s art was not that easy to better. 


On Thursday 25th January 2018 at 5:30pm, Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait. I thought it was a quite a good documentary - but also a propaganda piece worthy of Kim Jong-un’s North Korea - and devoid of any real dissenting voices. I think that if the director and more importantly Schnabel (who was really in charge), had chosen to make a documentary that contrasted Schnabel’s art world, financial and celebrity success - with the critical scorn and public contempt of him and asked the viewers to make up their own mind - they would have had a truly interesting documentary. Because the true story of Schnabel was not that he was the new Pablo Picasso - but rather the new Hans Makart or Bernard Buffet. He had become immensely successful producing a kitsch re-run of German Expressionism and Abstract-Expressionism and marketing himself as a macho artist. But success, fame and money had corrupted him artistically - because he never really had to question himself and thus deepen the meaning of his art. But Schnabel the narcissistic egotist, was much like Donald Trump in his total was inability to countenance any criticism of himself. He claimed to have “blind faith” in his abilities – yet could not deal with the possibility - that others did not share his self-love. Schnabel’s adoration of his own art was both bizarre and comical, sitting in his tennis court surrounded by his new oil on tarpaulin paintings in the documentary A New Spirit in Painting: 6 Painters of the 1980’s from 1984, he lamented that he did not have enough time to enjoy looking at his paintings because he kept seeing something new in them, and decades later he was seen bursting into tears in another documentary because he found a scene in his film Before Night Falls so moving and brilliant. 


Still, it also struck me that the reason for the hatred of so many towards Schnabel especially in New York was based on pure bilious jealousy and envy. Since the vast majority of the millions of artists in the world (ever mind the over 90,000 in New York) are abject failures, the sight of Schnabel succeeding almost effortlessly in art and cinema and enjoying his life so much - was vomit inducing. As for me, I worshiped Schnabel and thought him worthy of all the success he had - if only because he was one of the last (albeit diminished) standard bearers of emotional and expressive painting. On the other hand, I despised the success of similar mega-artists like Koons and Hirst primarily because they stood for everything I was against formally in art. But I also realised, that I was no more Schnabel’s heir - than a lunatic in a psychiatric hospital was Donald Trumps. Schnabel had a stable, loving and supportive family background in which his every whim was encouraged – whereas I had schizophrenic and chaotic childhood - which had brutalised my ego and resulted in me having an immature and arrested development. Unlike Schnabel who was confident, gregarious and extrovert – I was crippled with self-doubt, shyness, mental illness and anti-social complexes. I may have been technically more skilled than Schnabel in a conventional sense (yet who wasn’t) – but I lacked his formal originality and my obsession with insane, obscene, pornographic and sexist imagery - doomed my art to rejection by intellectuals, the art world, and the general public. While Schnabel had hewed out vast areas of the art world and humanity as his domain – I remained shut-in my terrace house in self-imposed imprisonment - as an abject failure. And while in my brief period of success from 2000-2002, I had naïvely agreed that the Oisín Gallery could print two catalogues for my exhibitions full of conservative, formal, psychological and Feminist critique and dissent – Schnabel had been smart enough to insist on pure hagiography and the cult of personality in every catalogue on him I had ever read – and I had read over 60 of them!


Along with Basquiat and Koons, Schnabel was the last real art star to emerge in New York. Mathew Barney may have been a cult amongst art students, writers for Artforum and fans of Bjork but that’s about all. In my opinion, at his best, Schnabel was one of the very best painters of the last thirty years up there in my mind with the likes of Jean-Michel Baquiat, Lucian Freud, Anslem Kiefer, Georg Baseltiz, Luc Tuymans, David Salle, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Paula Rego, and Frank Aeurbach.
 

However, at his worst (which he frequently was) Schnabel was no better than a first-year art student. Wiser and less ambitious painters would never have tried to take on such big themes of life and death and though Schnabel failed spectacularly at times – even his failures could be instructive to younger artists. Jonathan Fineberg has perceptibly written about Schnabel’s strengths and weakness and how they were interconnected: “Schnabel’s work is an outrageous explosion of inarticulate energy, filled with contradictory, good passages and bad, all at maximum intensity. That very inconsistency is also its greatest strength. Schnabel takes formal risks and pursues grandiose ambitions that no cautious or deliberate artist would ...Schnabel mixed multiple styles of drawing within a single composition and in the eighties would incorporate antlers, paint on velvet, and freely change styles altogether from one painting to the next. His strength was the ability to assimilate everything he saw into his compositions. Schnabel attempted to be as uncensored as possible... Schnabel calls the integration of painting and image as well as the premise of stylistic continuity into question. He paints a representational and an abstract picture at the same time.” (Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd., 2000 P. 448-9.)

Taking on the old bug-bear about the authenticity of Schnabel’s angst that had troubled critics like Kuspit, Alison Pearlman in Unpackaging Art of the 1980s in 2003 suggested that: “Schnabel’s consistent use of irony also contradicts Donald Kuspit’s expectation that Schnabel intends his work as a straight revival of Expressionist Angst, an expectation that prompt’s Kuspit to assail Schnabel for his failure to achieve Angst, in the following commentary: “What is one to make of Julian Schnabel’s ‘profundity’?… Schnabel is eager for the influence of the past to make up for the anxiety he doesn’t have.”” (Alison Pearlman, Unpackaging Art of the 1980s, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, P.44.)  But for Alison Pearlman what was interesting about Schnabel and made him so unique was his odd combination of Conceptualism and Abstract-Expressionism. As she observed: “Schnabel’s works serve not to revive but to subvert the conventions that paired certain subjects with certain formats and art-historical schools and movements. His commingling of previously segregated forms and subjects allows Schnabel to question established hierarchies of cultural value – the profound versus the trivial, monumental versus incidental, ambitious versus humble, heroic versus foolish, valued versus degraded. In the process, Schnabel borrows rhetorical power from the dramatic aspects of the sources themselves, conjuring up the treasure-chest mystique of old-master imagery and the operatic gesture of Abstract-Expressionist painting. But instead of using those modes to revive them, he uses them as signs of profundity, monumentality, ambition, heroism, and high value – which he then parodies by combining them with contrapuntal signs. His public persona likewise combines modes that had previously been considered irreconcilable – Conceptual and Warholian media-savvy with Abstract-Expressionist Sturm and Drang.” (Alison Pearlman, Unpackaging Art of the 1980s, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, P.147.)


The trouble was Schnabel painted too much, too hastily and too uncritically. For example, in 1982 alone, he had no fewer than nine solo exhibitions and took part in about fourteen group exhibitions around the world. You cannot keep up that kind of schedule without taking a reckless approach to art. If one whittles down the thousands of paintings Schnabel produced to a few hundred - one is left with a far more impressive array of works. As a painter, Schnabel’s greatest work was produced between 1978 and 1995. Or in other words, the work he made when married to Jacqueline and then Olatz and few years after he started filmmaking. Before that he was a crude neophyte - after that he produced larger but thinner, less ambitious, less original and increasingly empty paintings. Most of Schnabel’s later work varied from goggle-eyed Neo-Expressionist plate painting portraits of the rich and famous – to slathered abstract doodles in thick oil paint on canvases as large as ten feet by fourteen feet – scrawled with the names of friends or places he went on vacation. It was paintings like these that prompted the mediocre and attention seeking art critic Jonathan Jones in The Guardian in 2003 to write that they were: “a waste of good colours.” It was a cruel and I feel unfair criticism - far better levelled at many of the British artists Jones endlessly trumpeted like Damien Hirst. Nevertheless, in the same article Jones lamented that artists of Schnabel’s ambition did not exist in New York anymore and he was 100% right in the later at least.