The Brooklyn Rail

Bouquet of Mistakes, an exhibition of works produced between 2022 and 2023, continues Julian Schnabel’s exploration of how narrative and abstraction interact. This relationship, which confers on his painting a baroque complexity, is especially fraught in his cinematic work, where a pictorial scene can interfere with narrative flow. His seventh movie, In the Hand of Dante, based on Nick Tosches’s 2002 novel of the same name, will soon be released, and the paintings in the present show were made in tandem with its filming.

The spirit of Tosches’s text hovers over the exhibition. The novel enacts a series of metamorphoses: how Dante’s inspiration becomes the Divine Comedy; how a manuscript in Dante’s hand becomes a commodity; how that commodity becomes money; and how the figure behind that transformation, named Nick Tosches, transforms from novelist to a character who is both thief and murderer. Sounds sordid, and much of it is, with Tosches the character serving as a parallel to Dante the pilgrim, both ordinary man and protagonist of the Commedia. Embedded in the novel is a conversation between Dante, questing for the justification that would enable him to finish Paradiso, and a wise Jew—the object of Dante’s quest—reading him a passage from the Gospel of Thomas that was not discovered until 1945. The wise man translates (yet another metamorphosis) one of the aphorisms attributed to Jesus in that non-canonical text: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Tosches enunciates the artistic imperative, the need to express whatever the muse or inspiration has breathed into the artist. To express—to breathe out—means salvation; to retain breath means to die. This is the best definition, if a human being can be defined, of Julian Schnabel. All the works here are on the velvet Schnabel has been using of late. Ten are of uniform size (6.5 × 8 feet) and are all framed in identical, peculiar frames of light wood adorned with an almost Rococo motif of acorn clusters. These strange frames hark back to an earlier age, and it is as if Schnabel were saying we may keep frames of the past, but must fill them with new work.

Three of these have unrelated subjects, while seven are variations on a single title, The Nine Skies and the Mountain Fortress (all 2023). The three seemingly ad hoc works merit special attention. Hannibal Crossing the Alps (2022) reprises Turner’s 1812 painting Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, and Schnabel follows Turner’s emphasis on the power of nature in the original. Hannibal and his men are barely visible in Turner’s painting, subordinated to the gale. Schnabel riffs on this by depicting crags and an abyss in a windy tumult, though we suspect his storm to be a kind of self-portrait rather than a nature study. As its title suggests, Glimpse (2022) is a peek through an aperture into a void, a painting fraught with doubts and fears. Gesù Deriso. Jesus Mocked (2023) is the strangest of the three: Schnabel references Fra Angelico’s 1440 fresco in cell seven of the Convent of San Marco in Florence. As he does with the Turner, Schnabel does not copy but instead translates Fra Angelico into his own idiom. He edits out the figures of the Virgin and Saint Dominic in the original, focusing on the veiled, enthroned Christ being spit upon by a floating head and beaten by disembodied hands. In terms of theme, this extraordinary work connects directly to Schnabel’s relationship with Tosches, whose 2015 novel Under Tiberius represents Christ as a charlatan caught up in his own fraudulent invention of a prophetic persona. An artist, therefore, who becomes his own creation and suffers crucifixion.

The seven versions of The Nine Skies and the Mountain Fortress, all oil and bleach on velvet, transform the idea of the mocked Christ—or artist—into a metaphorical tower beset by storms. Towers are complex symbols, with meanings that range from phallic assertion to prideful enterprises like the tower of Babel. For Schnabel, the tower piercing nine levels of a spiritual hierarchy—the “nine skies,” taken from Tosches’s novel—would seem to be the personal fortress, standing fast in the face of adversity.

The lollapalooza of the show is the huge (14 × 27 feet), Buñuel Awake (for Jean-Claude Carrière) or Bouquet of Mistakes (2022), composed of ten smaller works cobbled together into a grand mural. Commemorating the collaboration between the Spanish Surrealist, Luis Buñuel (1900–1983) and the French novelist and cineaste Jean-Claude Carrière (1931–2021) who together made six films, this huge work brings Schnabel back to his meditation on narrative and abstraction. The ten panels may be gathered in an arbitrary order, or they may express an artistic will to narrative unity. Impossible to say, but the overall effect is dazzling and, like the entire show, Julian Schnabel at his best.