I t takes some chutzpah to station a 17-foot-tall sculpture by the name “Idiota” on the lawn outside your dining room window. The title, a put-down in several languages, is no inside joke: it’s scrawled in 24-inch letters across the top of the work, which is cast in bronze and shaped like a battle standard. As an amuse-bouche, it’s an attention-getter.
Julian Schnabel, never short on chutzpah, made “Idiota” in 1988 on the grounds of a Spanish monastery that had been forcibly converted into military barracks in the 19th century and later abandoned. Framed up from found wood planks and later cast, the sculpture is totemic, gloomy and weirdly compelling. On a grassy lawn in Montauk, New York—Schnabel’s grassy lawn—it’s also slightly comical. Who’s the idiot? And whose names are those painted on its pole?
They belong to the assistants who helped Schnabel fabricate the piece, a gracious move by a public figure known, past and present, for his ambition and self-reflecting persona. But Schnabel has never been an artist without contradiction.
Now 73, he became prominent in his mid-20s with paintings that welcomed certain roped-off aspects of art-making back into the club; among them gesture, touch, bodies, history and romance. The novelty of these subjects in late 1970s art didn’t prepare viewers for what came next: paintings on cracked plates, paintings on distended velvet, paintings on cowhide or sails or tarps drenched in pond green, inky purple or a wan, boiled egg-yolk color that Schnabel identifies as Naples yellow—all of which still deliver a jolt and induce collectors to reach for their Apple wallets.
This fall, Schnabel’s wide-ranging work is being reassessed alongside that of more than 20 other artists in “Downtown/Uptown: New York in the Eighties,” organized by Mary Boone in collaboration with Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery in New York. Mnuchin Gallery is planning a survey of his plate paintings and Chateau La Coste, Paddy McKillen’s art center and vineyard in the south of France, has a show scheduled for next summer. Its curator is Donatien Grau, head of contemporary programs at Musée du Louvre, Paris. Grau explains that the eight monumental paintings to be installed in a former wine-storage vault will be just a taste of the whole: “Julian’s work, like his person, his way of inhabiting the world, is very vast. It takes different forms—it consistently invents itself.”
Forty years ago, Grau says, Schnabel presented himself as “a young American painter looking towards Europe as opposed to at conceptualism,” the flinty, inward-gazing movement that had seduced the New York art vanguard. A decade later, audiences encountered a self-taught painter/filmmaker with the 1996 release of “Basquiat,” his directorial debut. (Schnabel has just completed his seventh feature). And today, Grau suggests, the artist’s relevance can be found in “the multiplicity of his perception. You can just feel his extraordinary drive towards freedom. That, I think, is exceptionally inspiring.” A Schnabel for every age?
The artist’s latest movie, “In the Hand of Dante,” premiered in September at the Venice Film Festival after a 17-year gestation period. It’s been a family effort: Schnabel co-authored the screenplay with his wife, Louise Kugelberg, and his sons Vito and Olmo Schnabel are among its producers (Schnabel has seven children from four relationships). The film, which stars Oscar Isaac and Gal Gadot and is loosely based on Nick Tosches’ 2002 novel of the same name, follows an academic who discovers what may be an original manuscript of “The Divine Comedy,” Dante’s greatest epic. Parallel storylines are intercut across centuries, and the script registers Schnabel’s major themes in art and film: creation, redemption, posterity.
“I think the actual story of Dante—I mean, his work is a masterwork. His life was a mess,” Schnabel says when we meet in Montauk just before he heads off to Venice. It’s hard to picture these torn coveralls and trashed Keds being superceded in a few days by a tuxedo and pumps—he was about to become the recipient of the prestigious Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award—but such must be the vastness of Schnabel’s world. “We imagine, when somebody’s art comes to some sort of perfection, that their life is perfect, too,” he says of Dante. “But being an artist, I wanted to put it out there that it’s not like that.”
The message will be familiar to audiences of Schnabel’s previous films on Jean-Michel Basquiat and Vincent Van Gogh, and it squares with his own experience. Born in Brooklyn in 1951, he moved with his family to Brownsville, Texas, a border town on the Gulf Coast, when he was 14. Music and surfing were his escapes, and the experience of making his own longboards was a precursor to mixing and pouring fiberglass onto painting surfaces a decade later. Schnabel earned a BFA from the University of Houston, but things didn’t heat up for him until he entered the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 1973 (on an application submitted, in part, between slices of white bread. Did it help? He shrugs).
Following his first exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston in 1976, Schnabel traveled through Europe for six months and eventually settled in Manhattan, getting by as a restaurant line cook and painting at night. He played around with wax, resin and bronze and began building up wood panels with Bondo, a putty-like adhesive used in repairing auto bodies, into which he cemented shards of plates, as if setting dentures. “I wanted to make something that was exploding as much as I wanted to make something that was cohesive,” Schnabel later wrote of his process.
As a platform for painting, plates made for a pretty gnarly wave. The new works were raw, impudent and an immediate hit. Two sold-out shows at New York’s Mary Boone Gallery in 1979 were followed by an equally successful Boone/Leo Castelli show in 1981, and then by Schnabel’s debut at Pace Gallery in 1984. Apart from a 14-year hiatus at Gagosian Gallery, he’s been with Pace ever since.
“Julian Schnabel was the hottest artist of the Eighties,” Pace founder Arne Glimcher gloated to the writer Annie Cohen-Salal in 2008. “He wanted to be in the gallery that was showing Picasso and Dubuffet. The first year, I made nine million dollars on Schnabel. Leo was very angry and hardly spoke to me after that.”
With each successive show, the critical takes—and take-downs—of Schnabel’s work, now branded as neo-expressionism, seeped farther into the art world’s collective psyche. Reviewing the 1981 Boone/Castelli show in Newsweek, Mark Stevens lobbed the ultimate backhanded compliment. The paintings, he wrote, were “vulgar in the extreme—melodramatic, derivative, rhetorical, kitschy—some of the most important aspects of contemporary culture.”
Schnabel’s precocity wasn’t limited to paintings. His loud mouth and louche dress echoed the spikiness and self-indulgence of 1980s New York, from the rap boasts of LL Cool J to the greed-is-good preening of Reagan-era Wall Streeters—and he wasn’t the only misbehaving artist on the scene. But his attitude didn’t go over well with the art establishment, and his reputation wilted as his public persona bloomed. It wasn’t until 2015 that the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired a major Schnabel painting, seven years after his film “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” had entered its archive. (MoMA now owns several works and, in 2024, accepted Schnabel’s gift of a plate portrait of philanthropist and MoMA Life Trustee Agnes Gund.)
As Schnabel has gotten older, his prodigious output and dedication to process and discovery have granted him new respect. Paintings and movies, surfboards and records, dinner tables and neo-baroque swimming pools and a Venetian-style high-rise—he’s made them all, with minimal slacking off. As he told an interviewer in 2017: “Every seven years I can make a film. But I paint all the time.”
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f there is a constant in Schnabel’s work, it lies in his investigation of found materials, which many critics consider his most enduring contribution to contemporary painting. In 2018, Max Hollein, now director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then director of San Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum, curated an outdoor exhibition of Schnabel’s large-scale abstractions, each 24 feet square. The sun-faded Mexican tarpaulins he co-opted for the works yielded unmixable ground colors and diaphanous effects, mediated by his searching brush marks. “In one sense, Schnabel does not develop his own personal language as much as locate himself in the language of the everyday,” Hollein wrote in his catalogue essay. “The artist’s work constitutes an intensely idiosyncratic selection from this grander lexicon, as he transforms the mundane into something ambiguous, emotionally charged, and overwhelming to the senses.” Curator Alison Gingeras isn’t alone in drawing connections between Schnabel’s work and the “drop-cloth aesthetic” of art-market headliners such as Urs Fischer, Oscar Murillo and Joe Bradley.
Schnabel has painted over found artwork (his “Big Girl” series started this way), his own previous efforts (“Jack The Bellboy/A Season in Hell,” 1975), and flipped finished paintings around to mark the stained back side (his spray paint series of 2014). Even the downtown Manhattan building he’s called home since 2008, Palazzo Chupi, is runnily streaked in carmine red over pink over thickly stuccoed brick. It’s all a rebuff to the concept of fixed meaning—and to finality itself.
“I think you can analyze what you do later, but as you’re doing it, you have to somehow escape judgment,” Schnabel says quietly. “The judgment that prevents you from moving forward.”
Plein air painting, in Montauk and elsewhere, has allowed him the ultimate freedom to experiment with surface effects, like dragging a canvas from a jeep or dousing a hose in gesso and lassoing the flat canvas. Even now, he leaves unfinished work out in a thunderstorm without a second thought. His conversion to working in daylight dates back to his early all-nighters in Manhattan. After selling his first plate painting, “The Patients and the Doctors,” to the dealer Annina Nosei for $3,500, Schnabel delivered the piece to her townhouse one morning. Out on the sidewalk, “It looked like a woman who put her makeup on in a bathroom without the correct light,” he says with a dry laugh. He’s relied on natural light ever since.
“I think you can analyze what you do later, but as you’re doing it you have to somehow escape judgment.”
Lately, he’s been painting on enlargements of 18th-century maps, revisiting the navigational imagery he’s explored repeatedly since the 1980s. In Ansedonia, in southern Tuscany, Schnabel studied the ubiquitous umbrella pines and captured their bristled arms by painting with a brush at the end of a stick. The subject was new to him, and he was excited by similarities between maps, trees and human anatomy. “There’s the energy in these things and also the brokenness,” he says. “The way they configure I found compelling.”
There have also been new plate paintings, including a mesmerizing portrait of a dark-haired woman in a flowered dress that sits on an easel in Schnabel’s Montauk studio. When art dealer Robert Mnuchin approached him recently about revisiting the series in depth, he agreed. “I called Julian and he was very amenable,” says Mnuchin, who has known the artist for decades. “I bought a plate painting myself at the very beginning. I mean, literally the beginning, probably among the first five or so.” He sold it at some point, and the heavily impastoed work traded hands again in 2016 for just over a million dollars. “It was a wonderful painting—it was called, ‘What Once Denoted Chaos is Now a Matter of Record,’” Mnuchin recalls, pausing for a minute. “Great title, isn’t it?”
Among the unfinished works in Schnabel’s studio are two triangular plate paintings. A first for him, and not portraits but landscapes. “I’d never seen a triangular landscape before,” he says, glancing over at them. “There’s something that’s pictorial, but there’s something also that is absolutely artificial about it. And so you get the sense of observing observation.” They’re ominous, these paintings, with cracked cobalt skies receding above mountains of dark shale.
“It’s interesting what you could do with paint,” Schnabel says, turning away from the studio toward the house. He phrases it not as an achievement, but as a proposition.
“I mean, paint’s great.”
