Julian Schnabel

Julian Schnabel shnä´bel , 1951-, American artist, b. Brooklyn, N.Y. He studied art at the Univ. of Houston and the Whitney Museum. A neoexpressionist, he became a superstar of the 1980s art world after his first one-man show in New York (1979). Schnabel is particularly noted for large paintings that incorporate broken crockery, e.g., The Walk Home (1985), and for other kinds of work that flout high-art conventions, such as paintings on velvet or linoleum. Later paintings include large portraits of women with lines painted across their eyes and abstract works derived from antique French x-rays. He has also executed a number of sculptures and is well known for his pronouncements on art. In the 1990s he branched out into writing and singing and also became a successful filmmaker, directing Basquiat (1996) and Before Night Falls (2000). Schnabel's reputation as a director was enhanced by his highly acclaimed The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), which like his other films is a biography and addresses issues of art and suffering.

Bibliography: See his memoir, C.V.J.: Nicknames of Maitre D's and Other Excerpts from Life (1987), and his survey of his life and work, Julian Schnabel (2003).

Schnabel, Julian (1951– ). American painter (and latterly sculptor and film director). His paintings are characteristically 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, 1982, Tate, London) or incorporate other three-dimensional objects (sometimes the supports themselves are three-dimensional, with central projections like a chimney breast). In the 1980s he enjoyed a meteoric rise as the most touted figure in the international art world, treated more like a pop star than a painter, and many critics feel 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. 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.’ In 1983 he began making sculpture, and in 1996 he made his debut as a movie director with Basquiat;, about the Graffiti artist Jean-MichelBasquiat.