Schnabel, Julian

Schnabel, Julian (1951– ). American painter (and latterly sculptor and film director). He was born in Brooklyn, New York, studied at the University of Houston, graduating in 1972, and had his first one-man show at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, in 1976. In 1979 two exhibitions at the Mary Boone Gallery, New York, brought him his first notable success, and in the 1980s he enjoyed a meteoric rise as the most touted figure in the international art world. As early as 1982 he had a retrospective exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, one of the world's leading museums of modern art, and it became common for the press to treat him more like a pop star than a painter. His paintings are large and in a Neo-Expressionist vein; often they are on unusual materials such as carpet or velvet, and some of them are encrusted with broken crockery (Humanity Asleep, Tate Gallery, London, 1982) or incorporate other three-dimensional objects (sometimes the supports themselves are three-dimensional, with central projections like a chimney breast). Schnabel writes of his work: ‘My painting is more about what I think the world is like than what I think I'm like. I'm aiming at an emotional state, a state that people can literally walk into and let themselves be engulfed by.’ He says that he regards his ‘peers’ as ‘Duccio, Giotto and van Gogh’ and although some people in the art world evidently share his colossally high opinion of himself, many critics find his pictures ugly, pretentious, and boring. Robert Hughes, for example, writes that ‘Schnabel's work is to painting what Sylvester Stallone's is to acting—a lurching display of oily pectorals—except that Schnabel makes bigger public claims for himself.’ A widespread feeling is that the huge prices his works have fetched depend more on media hype and the investment value of contemporary art than on any intrinsic merit. When one of his paintings failed to attract even a single bid at an auction in 1990, the audience broke into spontaneous applause. In 1983 Schnabel began making sculpture, and he has also directed the film Basquiat (1996), about the Graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.