Julian Schnabel
Portrait of Tatiana Lisovskaia As The Duquesa De Alba I, 2014
Oil, gesso, and resin on canvas
132h x 96w in
© Julian Schnabel Studio; Photo by Tom Powel Imaging
The World of Julian Schnabel
by Cornelius Tittel
Newspaper as collectible: Julian Schnabel explores the possibilities
Finally, the pages of this newspaper, designed by Julian Schnabel, are laid out before us. The artist examines them one last time, “Poor readers,” he says, and shakes his head, “they must be thinking that a madman took over their newspaper. The images are so different. And yet all of them are mine.” In fact, in his world, Julian Schnabel creates encounters of Old Master portraits with abstract paintings, the roses he saw on Van Gogh’s grave with pin-up beauties. He paints on broken pottery, tarpaulins, rugs, and large photographs using house paint and spray paint as he does classic oil paint. While leafing through this newspaper, we can see Schnabel’s distinctive paintings: the white swaths and colorful lines seem to dance across the pages and the various paintings unite in a single dance. We are proud to have continued the tradition of artist-designed newspapers, after George Baselitz, Ellsworth Kelly, Gerhard Richter, Neo Rauch, and Cindy Sherman, with this new issue of “Die Welt” produced with Julian Schnabel, one of today’s most important contemporary artists. Schnabel is a man who is not content to operate within a single medium. After his huge success within the art market of the 1980s he has reinvented himself as a filmmaker and received a director’s prize in Cannes, built palaces, and furnished hotels, and yet, above all, refers to himself as an artist. An artist who, for more than 40 years, has expanded the canon of painting like no one else, and as this newspaper proves, he continues to do so now.