Julian Schnabel, Large Girl With No Eyes, 2001, Oil and wax on canvas, 162 x 148 inches (411.5 x 376 cm); © Julian Schnabel Photo by Tom Powel Imaging
Everyone in the art world has preconceived notions about Julian Schnabel. He has lived many lives since his rise in the New York art scene in the 1980s with the reputation of an artist bad boy. But the art speaks for itself. His gigantic smashed-plate paintings, inspired by the mosaic benches of Antoni Gaudí, feel as radical today as when he unveiled the first one in 1978.
In the nearly five decades since, Schnabel has painted a stream of masterworks on velvet and tarp—all while honing an illustrious film career. Schnabel is a Cannes Film Festival and Golden Globes Best Director, as well as an Academy Award nominee. In the art world, he injected a dose of frenetic maximalism into a minimalism-saturated milieu. In Hollywood, he’s told the stories of tragic geniuses like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. Beneath all of it lies a relentless drive to create.
On this misty New York morning, Schnabel has a gentle, wistful aura. “I haven’t seen this painting in probably 30 years,” he says as he surveys the 11-by-17-foot plate painting Australia, 1986, which depicts the infamous 19th-century bushranger Ned Kelly in a frock coat. “It’s interesting to walk up and see what somebody made who might have happened to be you.”
The artist is at a contemplative point in his life. The process of revisiting his work in these two very different settings—Manhattan and the Hamptons—has him reflecting on the evolution of both his oeuvre and personal life. A parent of seven (spanning 40 years), he’s ready to muse about fatherhood. “There’s something unusual and amazing that your son or children care at all about what you were doing,” he says as he takes in the work hanging in his son’s gallery. “And then, that your son is trying to define and clarify and present that to the public in some way.”
Schnabel’s driver shepherds us to Vito’s West Village space to view the show’s second chapter. The SUV is littered with toddler detritus from his youngest child, Esmé—a baby doll and a toy stroller. Titled “Van Gogh’s Trees of Home for Peter Beard 2020,” this exhibition features more recent plate paintings. Made in 2020, they are as much a love letter to post-Impressionism as to Schnabel’s late friend, the photographer Peter Beard, who died that year.