Julian Schnabel Hero and Villain
cypher
about these days - though Schnabel the movie maker has become more
popular and critically respected. Schnabel the painter exists now as a
figure of fun - the story of an artistic success (beyond the wildest
and most greedy wet dreams of crass art students) brought low by
critical dismissal and a massive shift in the taste of collectors and
the art establishment. The same stupid cow eyed art students who today
laugh out loud at his name - are of the same cast who in the 1980's
had hero worshiped him. Robert Hughes summed up the general view of
Schnabel in the art world (one Hughes had done much to shape) by the
late 1990's: "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."(American Visions 1997). But I will always have fond
memories and love for his work whether he is in or out of fashion.
I first came across Julian Schnabel in 1988 when I saw him being
interviewed on a television program. At that the time he was painting
his monstrously large 'Recognition Paintings' on old army and boxing
ring tarpaulins. Many of these works were featured in the program and
I instantly fell in love with them and this brash American who looked
like Orson Wells.
Living in Ireland in the 1980's it was utterly impossible to find a
book on Schnabel and it was before the Internet had made visual and
intellectual research so easy. Today you can just type in Julian
Schnabel images and in a second view hundreds of them on line. So 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.
Then I late in December 1991 - I bought Julian Schnabel's book
Drawings 1979-1989. Initially though I was put off by their slap-dash
character - his drawings often looked little better than mindless
doodles. I wondered at a world in which such simplistic scrawls could
be thought of as great art - but I also envied Schnabel! How lucky he
was to have his every fart of paint be considered - epic, tragic,
metaphysical and profound! However my familiarity with Beuys drawings
helped me to understand the orgin of Schnabel's drawing style and soon
I grew to love them. This was a level of skill - I could easily
imitate!
I also felt an instant emaphy with the adolescent character of
Schnabel - much in the same way I had with Egon Schiele and Jean-
Michel Basquiat. The fact that his brand of aggressive, egotistical
and expressionist art had been so successful gave me hope that my own
art would also be admired. This was despite the fact that 'Schnabel
bashing' had become a favorite past-time of the cognoscenti,
especially those who had only ever read Robert Hughes or Brian Sewell.
Since the early 1980's, Schnabel had been seen as nothing more than a
product of the hype and greed of the New York art world. By the 1990's
Schnabel was well out of critical favour and worse still he was no
longer fashionable. His paintings began to fail to meet their reserve
at auction and new collectors had already moved on to buying up Neo-
Geo and yBa work. As the figurehead for the excesses of the 1980's art
market and its subsequent catastrophic collapse, Schnabel became a
figure of derision. But despite this wave of critical disdain - I
remained faithful to Schnabel. By 2000 I may have stopped using his
influence in my work - but I continued to periodically look at his art
with interest.
One of the key things I was attracted to in Schnabel's oil paintings
on broken plates, velvet, theater backdrops and tarpaulin's was its
lack of taste (for want of a better word). I viewed Schnabel's work as
a kick in the teeth to 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 was 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. All of which I intensely
empathized with and sought to draw strength from. To me painting was
first and foremost a pleasure and a personal source of growth and
realization, not an objective inquiry following such and such a
historical development.
Later in Amsterdam in 1992 - I managed to buy three catalogues on
Schnabel and his autobiography 'CVJ (Nicknames of Maitre D's & Other
Excerpts From Life)' which had been published in 1987. His
autobiography CVJ - which he said was a cross between Charles Dickens
and Gertrude Stein - came out in the same year as his major
retrospective (at the age of thirty-six!) at The Whitney Museum in New
York. In fact it was these two events and their critical panning that
marked the turning point in Schnabel's career.
Anyway through the late 1990's I sent off to antiquarian book shops
like Ursus Books in New York for catalogues on Schnabel - it was an
expensive but rewarding habit. I greeted each catalogue in my postbox
with the giddy excitement of a child at Christmas. Today I have 21
catalogues and books devoted to Schnabel. But by the turn of the
millennium my passion for his work had evaporated. 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 dammed him as a Playboy/Hollywood
Expressionist.
>From 1991-1999, Julian Schnabel's influence on the formal look of my
painting was enormous. In the Winter of 1991 - I took from Schnabel's
broken plate surfaces - by painting on sheets of thick paper collaged
roughly with other torn up sheets of paper on top. Like Schnabel I
enjoyed the idea of upsetting the surface of the support and create
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 inadequacy's 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 (1995-1997) 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. Then from
mid 1996 until early 1998 I was stirred by Schnabel's Neo-Abstract-
Expressionist paintings which were like pumped up Cy Twombly drawings
slathered and smeared on mural sized tarpaulin. Then I was influenced
in 1997 by his painting on top of junk shop paintings by antonymous
armatures - 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'. Like Picasso, Schnabel gave me an important example in his
rejection of the trap of a signature style. Moreover his writing style
shamefully influenced my own through out the late 1990's.
After spending most of my life seeing only a handful of painting by
Schnabel in the flesh I finally saw a full retrospective of his work
in Madrid in 2004. However when I finally saw so many Schnabel`s in
the flesh, I found my high opinion of the Americana's dented. Compared
to Max Beckman or Jackson Pollock he was just a theatrical,
decorative, showy Neo-Expressionist. That said - I still found great
beauty in many of his canvases.
His brushwork was rough, impetuous and ad hoc. He roughly slathered
the paint on his canvases in huge smears. He seemed to start where
felt like on the canvas and finished when he got bored. Sometimes he
was happy with a few smears and shapes and other times he worked the
image up densely. He painted all his abstract shapes in a semi-opaque
semi-thick run of colour. This was painting at speed! Schnabel's
paintings were simple designs on a large scale. He used size to
intimidate and overwhelm the public. His shapes were evocative of the
natural world, graffiti and abstract expressionism. Schnabel compared
himself to Picasso, Beckman and Pollock, but where was the deep angst
and deathly seriousness about technique and feeling that was present
in their work I wondered out load in the gallery. Looking again and
again, I wondered where was the deep emotional impact that I had come
to expect in Schnabel's work. Most of the time it looked like Schnabel
started his abstract painting with no planing and finished them when
he felt like it. They often looked unfinished, and I was left
wondering what if he had kept painting. I remembered that painters
like Whistler, De Kooning, and Auerbach had painted, scraped down,
painted and scraped down over and over again, until they came up with
a truly convincing image.
Often Schnabel paintings looked to me sloppy and disingenuous. His
paintings had less impact on me in the flesh than they did in
reproduction. In photographs they seemed thickly painted and more
graphic. In the flesh they looked more sparsely painted and effected.
For all their emotionalism, they did not have the power of a Bacon or
Pollock. Schnabel's figurative drawing was woefully inept. There was
absolutely no sense of a real study from life. Schnabel's drawing was
lumpy, crude and awkward. He was unable to give his line/contours
spring and weight. Schnabel's drawings of faces were adolescent and
naive. His eyes were too big, his lips too fat and his noses too long
and poorly shaped.
In the plate paintings Schnabel's impasto was 'ready-made' by the
broken plates. The emotion of the impasto was thus conceptualized. In
fact the paint applied over the plates was very thin and sometimes
transparently brushed on. It was a sculptural impasto.
Everything in Schnabel's abstract paintings was staked on controlled
chance and immediacy. My work in comparison looked too contrived
worked out and ordered. Schnabel ripped off Victor Hugo, Tapies,
Twombly, and Polke in his paintings, but his paintings lacked the
thought and myth of their work. His work was modish and theatrical.
His large-scale abstract expressionist influenced work from 1994
onwards felt and looked like theater backdrops. Sometimes Schnabel
came up with beautiful and elegant drips, swirls and blotches of
paint. But I was left wondering if any of his biomorphic shapes had
any real meaning in the way a Klee, Kandinsky or Pollock did. His
paintings were covered in accidental drips, tears and spots of paint.
In the flesh his work was more nuanced than in reproduction - it was
more decorative and less graphic. Twombly's shadow loomed large, in
these large works whose vast scale washed out any emotional
involvement. I felt that no painter no matter how passionate could not
load such vast canvases with real emotion. I remembered that De
Kooning rarely painted on canvases larger than 70" x 80" because that
was the limit of his reach. Remember I was a fan of Schnabel's work.
But I had based my knowledge of his work on reproductions. In
photographs his paintings looked more graphic, more incident packed
and more powerful all round. In photographs I didn't see the
squandering of paint and reckless use of canvas by a millionaire.
Moreover Schnabel's colours were not emotive like Beckman, De Kooning
or Bacon's were. In fact Schnabel's paintings were highly mannered
affairs. In comparison to Schnabel - my paintings look compacted,
explosive, thickly impastoed and dense. But I saw no torment in
Schnabel's work.
Schnabel was born in 1951 in Brooklyn New York. When he was thirteen
his family moved to Brownsville Texas on the US/Mexian border. In CVJ
Schnabel disconcertingly calls his younger unsuccessful self 'Jack The
Bellboy'. But when he becomes famous in CVJ - he proclaims himself
JULIAN SCHNABEL. At the age of eighteen he went to study in the
University of Houston and earned the degree of Bachelor of Fine arts.
In 1973 he applied for a place on The Whitney Independent Study
Program. He famously sent his slides in between two slices of bread -
he got a place.
In New York he worked as a Taxi driver and sunglasses salesman. At
Max's Kansas City a bar frequented by painters - he met artists like
Blinkey Palermo and Sigmar Polke. He then worked as a part-time cook
at Mickey Ruskins Ocean Club.
Between 1976 and 1978 - Schnabel traveled a number of times to Europe.
First to Italy, then to Germany and then to Madrid and Barcelona in
Spain. It 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 crass, deluded and amateurish)
marks him out as almost unique. What Schnabel discovered in Europe 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 1960's and 1970's had been dominated
by impersonal styles like Pop Art, Op Art, Photo-realism, Minimalism
and Conceptualisim. The personal had been abandoned in favour of the
commerical, the social, the political and the theoretical. What
artists like Joseph Beuys, Blinky Palermo, 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
Chainsawed Wood. Their work pastished, plagerised, 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 1978 Schnabel visited Madrid and Barcelona. 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 sketchbook 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. In Barcelona he visited Antonio Gaudi's Parc
du Guell which was an incredibly joyful mix of sculpted follies
encrusted with a Mosaic of brightly coloured ceramic. It was seeing
these that gave Schnabel the idea of creating a wooden panel, covering
it in bondo, dentist cement, joint compound - anything strong enough
to the hold broken shards of dinner plates. Over this he would then
paint abstract studies in sculptural form and pseudo-mysticism. Back
in New York he made his first 'Plate-Painting' like 'The Patients and
the Doctors', 1978. 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.
When he exhibited two plate paintings in the Mary Boone Gallery late
in 1979 they caused a sensation. No one had ever seen anything like it
- it was quite simply the greatest gimmick in the history of painting.
But that was both the reason for their success and also the reason for
their critical slating. By 1981 Leo Castelli the most powerful dealer
in New York at the time moved in and shared Schnabel with Boone. When
Schnabel finished with Mary Boone and moved to the Pace Gallery it was
reported widely in the press like Schnabel was a movie star or rock
musician breaking with his management. His egotism went over well with
greedy and naive collectors looking for the 'Next-Big-Thing' and
Schnabel rode the wave of the 1980's art market. America needed
artists like Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Salle to compete
with the increasing strenght and fashionability of European art and
frankly I think they held their own. Schnabel was featured in key
international group exhibitions like 'A New Spirit In Painting' in
1981 in the Royal Academy in London and 'Zeitgeist' in 1982 and
'Metropolis' in 1990 - both in Berlin.
At his best Schnabel was in my opinion 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. But at his worst (which he frequently was) he was
no better than a fourth year art student. The trouble was he painted
too much, too hastily and too uncritically. For example in 1982 he had
no fewer than nine solo exhibitions around the world. You can't keep
up that schedule without taking an almost industrial approach to
making art.
His work varied from goggle-eyed Neo-Expressionist portraits of the
rich and famous in the art world - 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
paintings like these that prompted the the art critic Jonathan Jones
in The Guardian in 2003 to write that they were: "a waste of good
colours."
He shamelessly stole images from Caravaggio, Artaud, Beckman,
Kokoscka, El Greco, Goya to name just seven glaring examples and he
greedily copied the abstract styles of Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly and
Antonio Tapies. His drawing style was crude, amateurish and sluggish.
His paintings were bombastic, manic and overpowering, and his
symbolism was pompous, confused and solipsistic. Over all one had the
impression of an adolescent tantrum of emotion and narcissistic
projection.
He mixed so many difference 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 there were paintings like 'Portrait
of God, 1981' (from his 'Mutant King' series) - in which he had seen
fit only to scrub on ultramarine Blue an anthropomorphic shape
reminiscent of a slug with a rake on its head and perched on a cross -
which left the viewer gobsmacked at his arrogant assumal that this
added up to a significant theological statement. In fact it was
Schnabel who surely influenced Damien Hirst to later give his very
different sculptural yBa works such as 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 modeling 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. In his drawings he pursued tricks like
drawing out of doors in ink and brush on watercolour paper while it
rained. Other times he painted crude abstract shapes over maps of
Italy.
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, aluminum, rugs and
God knows what else - in order to challenge his facility - to make the
drawing of his work that much harder. It was utter nonsense - Schnabel
could not draw and still can't in the conventional sense. But it was
typical of his self-love and blind faith in himself. That was were his
problems with the critics really began - he had a big mouth. In one
interview with Grace Glueck in The New York Times he claimed his only
real peers were Duccio, Giotto, and Van Gogh! Don't fool yourself -
many artists with not even a toe nail 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 I can think of talking about themselves in
this way are Boxers or UFC Fighters. In them it is excusable - no man
unsure of himself 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. However some of the
things that Schnabel said of himself are jaw droopingly narcissistic,
egotistical and naive. 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', 1992)
Schnabel became known for painting in silk pajamas, socializing with
Andy Warhol, being photographed by Helmut Newton, and his Long Island
Hampton home with outdoor studio and tennis gardens. Along with
Basquiat and Koons he was the last real art star to emerge in New
York. In the 1980's artists were the new Rock and Roll stars -
followed in the gossip coloums, courted by the rich, friends to the
famous stars of the music world and Hollywood. Schnabel could count
the likes of Denis Hopper and Elton John as friends. Later his
daughter dated the lead singer of The Red Hot Chili Peppers and
Schnabel designed the cover for one of their albums. But despite the
commercial and social success that Schnabel achieved - many of the
critics remained unimpressed.
In fact Schanbel's brought the best out of his critics and the worst
out in his apologists. Anyone remotely interested in the art of
criticism should read Robert Hughes' article published in the The New
Republic in 1987 - it is a masterpiece of Conservative, social and
historical analysis - spiked with some of the most devastatingly
bitchy put-down's I have ever read. As for his apologists like Kevin
Power, Thomas Mc Evillery and Donald Kuspit - they all demonstrate
just how obscure, overblown, and pretentious art writing can be. In
fact the clearest advocate of Schnabel was himself. CVJ was the most
honest account of Schnabel's work - even with all its pompous self-
delusion, metaphysical mumbo jumbo, grandiosity, and self-love.
When the art market collapsed in 1990 there was a backlash against the
hype, commercialism and Expressive bullshit of early eighties art. As
the biggest star of that day - Schnabel in particular took a whipping.
The prices of his canvases stagnated and even reduced in real terms at
auction.
Then in 1997 Schnabel wrote, produced and directed 'Basquiat' - a
romanticized version of the life of Jean Michel Basquiat. As a
historical film its is highly flawed. The appearance of 'Milo' a
character clearly based on Schnabel and using his paintings
prominently in the background seems an outrageous attempt on
Schnabel's part to lash his life-raft to the soring reputation of
Basquiat who had made the smart move to die at twenty-seven two years
before the collapse of the art market and the 1980's scene. But
despite its mawkish retelling of Basuqiat's life - I love this film
very much and have watched it at least two dozen times. Since then
Schnabel has directed two more critically acclaimed films which like
Basquiat are marked out by a visual intelligence, poetry and beauty as
well as a genuine love for other artists and human beings.
www.thepanicartist.com