Contemporary art collector and Vancouver “Condo King” Bob Rennie remembers the 1990 downward spike in the art market. “But talk to Patrick Painter about Schnabel,” said Rennie. “Patrick likes to claim he killed the market for Schnabel’s paintings. He works out of Los Angeles now, but Patrick had a gallery in Vancouver then.”
“It happened at a Sotheby’s night sale in 1990,” recalled Painter, who said he and Schnabel were once friends. “I brought in a nine-by-12-foot painting of Anh [Duong], a model Julian had dated, to sell. Nobody bid! Everyone clapped when it didn’t sell! I was considered a sort of hero for busting Julian’s ego. He’d become obnoxious. People were pissed at his disregard for the value of money.” (Painter, however, says he was still able to turn around and sell the work, entitled Anh in a Spanish Landscape, to esteemed art collector Eli Broad for a $10,000 profit.)
Asked about the story by Maclean’s, Schnabel took the high road. “I have absolutely no comment about this person,” said Schnabel, before adding a smackdown. “I don’t know what market he thinks he killed. To talk about him, we’re slumming.”
“Listen, people in the art world will always love having Julian around,” said fellow art star Eric Fischl, who has an exhibit at Barbara Edwards Contemporary in Toronto opening on Sept. 24. “He’s the alpha dog! He recovered from that backlash by making critically acclaimed movies and continuing to paint the whole time.” Chuck Close agreed, adding, “The success of the films is the perfect opportunity to re-evaluate his work and cement his place in art history.”
Artforum magazine is happy to have Schnabel back on its radar. “People were dying not to take Julian seriously since the plate paintings,” said Charles Guarino, the magazine’s publisher. “Whatever was considered overhyped in his art has been mitigated by his filmmaking.”
As AGO curator David Moos noticed, much of Schnabel’s painting speaks directly to his love of films. The large-scale, abstract and expressionistic works in the exhibit sometimes have less obvious ties to cinema than, say, the portraits of Gary Oldman and Dennis Hopper, or the iconic work on sailcloth called Jane Birkin #2. However, the cinematic theme running through the paintings is not a stretch. “And Julian’s voice will be on the audio guide, talking about how his artwork is often a direct response to cinema,” said Moos, who describes the exhibition’s catalogue as “unconventional.” And there are fun anecdotes, like Johnny Depp lending the AGO a self-portrait of the artist. A show like this can’t help but name-drop—and raise eyebrows.
Toronto art dealer Miriam Shiell, for one, was surprised to hear about the AGO’s Schnabel exhibit. “I wasn’t expecting the reassessment of the ’80s so soon,” she said. “And why Schnabel? There are hundreds of artists of that decade, and I can’t name you one Canadian collection of ’80s American neo-expressionism. A survey of his painting alone [without the film component] wouldn’t be interesting.”
With the cinematic complement, there is plenty to chew on in the AGO show. “When people look at your paintings, it’s more of a hermetic voyage [than watching your movies]. It’s like learning an alphabet,” said Schnabel, who broke off the interview to plug an installation his son Vito curated for Canadian artist Terence Koh. “It’s in a cornfield in Bridgehampton [in New York]. You’ve got to see it.”
That reminded him of something else. He had to attend the premiere of Eat Pray Love with pal Javier Bardem. Off he went.
But the next morning, Schnabel wanted to make sure Maclean’s got the party line: “I’m not big on explaining my art.” He then proceeded to give a succinct explanation that perhaps gets recycled regularly: “You have a copy of The Recognitions there, right? Open it to page 15. Around there, there’s something about ‘the persistent patterns of significant form.’ Something about clouds losing their form and that’s when their beauty appears. That’s what I do when I paint.”
Likewise, when he makes films, Schnabel eschews storyboards and remains “open” to whatever might happen on set. “I certainly couldn’t have made any of these movies without having my perspective as a painter, which is the thing that makes them different,” he said.
Then Schnabel needed to get back to the editing room, where he was locking in final sound for Miral before the Venice Film Festival. The editing suite is not inside the Palazzo, but nearby, where some cranky neighbours and jealous peers had better step aside. Surf’s up.
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