"I've always liked making things, ever since I was a kid,” Julian Schnabel told me as we sat at a rough-hewn table outside the lodge adjoining his outdoor studio in Montauk, N.Y. “I made my own surfboards when I was a teenager. And all the time I’ve been making movies, I’ve never stopped painting.”
And make things he has, in great abundance: The renowned American artist and filmmaker made the table we were sitting at, and the vaulted log lodge behind us, and the massive cast steel sculptures on the sunlit lawn overlooking the Atlantic, and the stack of unfinished canvases leaning up against the walls of his open-air studio. He has made countless paintings and sculptures since he emerged in the 1970s, as well as five feature films whose costumes and sets he was also pivotal in creating.
Schnabel can appear self-conscious these days about being a painter, and not without reason: With the critical success of Before Night Falls and the award-winning The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and with his new film Miral set to have its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 13, he is far better known as a filmmaker than as an artist. For many viewers, the 50-plus paintings, sculptures and photographs dating from 1975 to a few weeks ago filling the Art Gallery of Ontario’s fifth floor for Julian Schnabel: Art and Film will be the first works of art by Schnabel they will have had the opportunity to see in person -- or at all. Curated by David Moos, the AGO’s curator of contemporary art, and focusing on Schnabel’s long-standing romance with cinema, Art and Film will be the first major survey of the artist’s work since his controversial retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1987.
Art and Film features a number of early paintings that set the tone for the artist’s work as a whole. Titled after Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ravishing first feature about a beautiful young hood on the outskirts of Rome, the ground in Accatone (1978) is a flat, sticky, waxy red. Set on a pedestal in its foreground is a headless torso slashed out in quick strokes of white, a tribute to Pasolini’s playfully erotic classicism. In his 1979 homage to French filmmaker Jean Vigo, Procession (for Jean Vigo), a looping figure eight and a ghosted torso float in a field of oil and wax that is by turns crudely physical and tender. Schnabel’s combination of brazen literalness and lyrical delicacy is, however, most clearly on display in his plate paintings, three of which are on view in the current exhibition.
In The Patients and the Doctors (1978), for instance, shards of white and blue china scatter over three heavy wooden panels, one of which juts out from the wall; they are stuck in creamy, brownish-pink paint, rough shapes drawn over them. Mud in Mudanza (1982), by contrast, is brooding and melancholic, the broken plates and vases sunk in dark, muddy blues and ochres that shift across the three wooden panels, sunset red leaking from the upper edge. The pair of antlers chained high on the elevated central panel suggests that this is the scene of a crucifixion.
Schnabel’s use of novel materials is neither specifically symbolic nor an act of pure, boundary-crashing invention: It is rather his way of letting the weathered, fragmented, unstable world into the picture plane, resulting in works that can be both confrontational and elegiac. In the pivotal Portrait of Andy Warhol from 1982, Warhol’s ravaged face is ghostly and almost phosphorescent, his torso is a pulled blur of white, purple and pink, and below his clasped hands, his legs are blown into fragments of paint spattered across the deep black velvet ground. Warhol, who was obsessed by death and beauty from early on, is disappearing into a soft, plush darkness. Titled after Oliver Stone’s furious Vietnam melodrama, Platoon (1987) is a vortex of skulls and crosses, intestine-like tubes and white blotches on a dirty velvet ground. The painting suggests both the surrealism and the tawdry glamour of violence.
Since 1990, Schnabel has moved away from the compacted physical density of his earlier work toward an idiom that is more open and poetic -- and on a vastly larger scale. The single most spectacular room in Art and Film is the one housing three paintings conceived for the Maison Carée in Nimes, France, all painted on huge tarpaulins Schnabel stressed by dragging them behind a jeep. In Anno Domini (1990), clouds of blood red whip upward from the painting’s lower right hand corner, the letters “AD” ominously lathered on in white, and in Catherine Marie-Ange (1990) the clouds are turbulent and light-tinged, dark, swooping lines rising upward. The Maison Careé paintings are loaded with allusions to the history of painting, from Giotto’s Arena Chapel frescoes to Cy Twombly’s sumptuous late canvases, but they also retain an earthy toughness and frangibility, as though they might continue to change with the light and wind and weather.
Schnabel is an impulsive, hit-and-miss artist, and not all of the works selected for Art and Film are especially successful. The gesso splashed on to the reproduction of a photograph of Tahitian big wave surfing legend Malik Joyeux riding in front of a colossal wave in Painting for Malik Joyeux and Bernardo Bertolucci (V) (2006) is simply not enough to constitute a painting. But the show offers surprises as well, like the Veramente Bestia (“truly a beast” in Italian) paintings from 1988, in which the artist painted quirky abstract shapes over clunkily framed thrift store paintings. After the scale and grandeur of much of the show, they are a welcome reminder that Schnabel can be an intimate artist who takes pleasure in simply rummaging around the world.
Schnabel’s career is unprecedented for the simple reason that, in his mid-forties and already a famous artist, he reinvented himself as a highly original and successful filmmaker. “Over the past decade, there has been this question,” Moos says. “Is Julian Schnabel still a painter? This exhibition proposes an answer to this question.”
The answer, which is also pursued in the 368-page catalogue that accompanies the exhibition and includes an in-depth conversation between Moos and Schnabel on the relationship between art and film, is that for Schnabel painting and film are inextricably intertwined.
This should come as no surprise, since great cinema has always looked to painting for inspiration: The shimmering images in Vigo’s L’Atlante evoke French painting of the late 19th century, and Pasolini’s The Gospel of St. Matthew quotes Renaissance master Piero de la Francesca’s austerely beautiful depictions of Christ and his followers. And anyone who has seen Julian Schnabel: Art and Film will recognize that the balloon rising up from the ruined church on its doomed journey in Before Night Falls and the huge diving bell plunging into the depths in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly are both pure Schnabel.
Wading in the swimming pool that extends below his outdoor studio in Montauk in August, a tree festooned with flowering vines rising from a planter in the middle of the pool, Schnabel suddenly handed me his specially designed sunglasses. “Try these out,” he said. “They make everything look wonderful.”
In a way, it doesn’t matter whether Schnabel is primarily a painter or a filmmaker or anything else. Julian Schnabel is simply someone who likes making things, and looking at the world in new ways.
