The Brooklyn Rail

In the 1980s, when I started publishing criticism, Julian Schnabel’s art was much denounced. Leftists complained that his paintings were not politically critical while aesthetic conservatives said that they were historically retrograde. And several critics who should have known better cruelly made fun of him, as if his style of art-making revealed everything that was wrong with American culture. I confess that I accepted this viewpoint, guided less by what I saw (as a critic should be guided), than by what I had read about him. But it’s time to look again at Schnabel’s early works. Aesthetic response should be governed by concrete experience, not abstract theorizing. Now I have the opportunity to correct my previous judgment.

When I walked through the Vito Schnabel Gallery, I was dumbfounded, astonished, and pleased, all at once. I immediately saw that it was time to revise my prior judgment. The thirteen wide-ranging paintings here include No. 17 (Red Cross Painting for N. Fisher, 1978) (1977–78), which shows a couple of vertical staffs on a yellow background field, and Notre Dame (1979) incorporating Schnabel’s famous broken plates. There are obvious precedents. In the 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg silkscreened fields of images. And in analytic cubism Pablo Picasso attracted objects to his canvas. Working on a larger picture plane, the scale of American Abstract Expressionism, Schnabel extends those procedures. I would love to place his Leda and the Swan (from his “Mutant King” series) (1981) alongside Cy Twombly’s version of that subject. Or set Portrait of John Poyntz (1983) next to one of Francis Bacon’s portraits. And the amazing Alas (1987), which is painted on a Kabuki theater backdrop, shows an elaborate surrealistic apparatus. Once we look with care, we can find anticipations for Schnabel’s most surprising visual techniques. Like most radically original artists, he surely builds upon tradition. I have no particular ideas about the “meaning” of these pictures, or the unity of Schnabel’s interests. He comes off as someone who has too many visual thoughts to easily settle down into a signature style. And that’s a real strength here, for a lot is going on in almost all of these big pictures.

Radically original art is often difficult to judge justly when it is first shown. Look how long it took the art world to offer a fair appraisal of Paul Cézanne’s early paintings. And consider how much time was needed for many critics to understand Jackson Pollock’s all-over abstractions. Nowadays we may legitimately be astonished that some highly qualified judges failed to recognize the virtues of these canonical works. And that said, what I do find surprising is that in the 1980s exactly the same kind of problem reoccurred with Schnabel’s early works. While a few prescient critics admired these paintings, many able art writers (who knew this earlier history backwards and forwards) unthinkingly rejected them. I myself failed entirely to deal with this good critical challenge. How very surprising that these extremely sensuous artworks, which resist theorizing, pose this challenge for the theorist! Finding the right new criteria is not always easy—first impressions can be all wrong. That’s why we art writers need to keep on our toes.

I’m not saying that early Schnabel is the peer of Cézanne and Pollock, but neither am I denying that. For me right now, it’s too soon to tell. But in reconsidering these early works, I do see that Julian Schnabel has always been a really good, original, and various painter. Look for yourself and see if you don’t agree.