JULIAN SCHNABEL. A private portrait
- carlottaceccarini9
- Jul 21, 2022
- 4 min read
"I am a painter. I made films to tell stories, there is a part of my head that wants to tell stories, paintings are more hermetic, they don't need to be explained. I want to paint things that surprise me or that I haven't seen yet."
(Julian Schnabel)
Julian Schnabel, born in 1951, is an American painter of Jewish origin, also known as a film director. He directed Basquiat (1996) and the more recent Van Gogh, On the Threshold of Eternity (2018). Schnabel was also the director of other films including Before It's Night and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Director. Cinema is for Schnabel a form of expression that is very congenial to him, a form to express often the most tragic, almost extreme aspects of life.
He did not grow up surrounded by any form of beauty. He lived in one of those plastic houses. Until the age of 18, he lived circumscribed within very confined spaces. His sense of proportion, his love of huge paintings, immense buildings, his overflowing vision of things and his energy derived exclusively from him. (Stella Schnabel, Julian's daughter)
During his training, he attended a study course at the prestigious Whitney Museum, gaining access to it after sending the famous institution two slices of bread in an envelope with some slides in between, symbolising his particular sense of humour. Thus began his journey into the art world and soon became one of the most celebrated painters on the New York scene, an artist who changed the artistic climate by making painting more acceptable at a time dominated by conceptual art and sculpture. He began frequenting Max's Kansas City, a club where many intellectuals gathered. It was here that he came into contact with, among others, Mary Boone, who was immediately infatuated with Schnabel's art. In the early 1980s, she staged her first exhibition in the gallery of Boone and Leo Castelli. This was the first time an artist exhibited in two galleries at the same time. This was the beginning of a series of successes that would consecrate him in the history of contemporary art, landing him in museums of the calibre of MoMA and the Metropolitan in New York, the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He soon became a leading exponent of neo-expressionism.
An 'en plein air' painter of modern times: since 1979 he has always painted in the open air, adapting to the weather, which has often influenced his own paintings. Julian Schnabel is known for his large canvases in which he often adopts mixed techniques, e.g. lettering reminiscent of graffiti on Mexican walls, glossy canvases covered with resin, white outlines, irregular and powerful paint spots created by throwing or swiping cloths soaked in paint on the canvas or large painted patterns made on shards of ceramic plates (Plate Painting). Fluid paintings reminiscent of the water in which he used to surf as a young man, a preponderant element in Schnabel's artistic research, for whom water is a reference to the possibility of escape and a sense of freedom. Works that have reached astounding values on the art market.
What I really feel when I see Julian working is how he scrambles words, how he takes the things around him that have meaning, emotion, an inner echo, and working on the mechanisms of pleasure and reaction, he starts to play with them. This is present in his films, in his paintings, in his sculptures, sometimes even in the way he lives. (William Defoe)
A rebellious and eclectic artist, always dressed in his characteristic pyjamas. A man who has always had a cinematic vision of reality: his paintings are cinematic. A man who has been able to exploit the commercial dynamics of the art and film worlds, creating art in which everything is mixed to become an artistic product, but at the same time allowing his inner world to emerge. Abstract art for a gestural, figurative, physical and sanguine painter, as the art dealer Mary Boone herself defined him. Art is life for Julian Schnabel, his joy and the way to deal with his sorrows.
I try to tell my story using my sensibility. Many filmmakers use a literal, linear map whereas I use a painter's map. What I choose to observe, what I illustrate through music and the point on which I fix the camera ... is all painting. If there is no rain in the script and it starts to rain I don't stop shooting, I go with the rain. Someone asked me what my methods are. It's simple: I throw the actors into a pit. When they manage to get out they can go home. In painting it works the same way: you throw colours on the wall and see what comes out (Julian Schnabel)
The time-honoured use of the word 'abstraction' almost never made sense when applied to Julian. It was not abstraction so much as pure optical and emotional sensation somehow transported onto a flat surface. A reproduction of life in visual terms. (John Richardson, art historian and Picasso biographer)
Julian's art is also so interesting because it is open to everything. Julian is very interested in the physicality of art and the physicality of the individual, what it means to want and feel in this world, he expresses this through his paintings from which this vehemence always shines through. A vehemence that is not only in the brushstroke, but also in the idea. (Jeff Koons)
https://www.julianschnabel.com/
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