A CONVERSATION WITH JULIAN SCHNABEL

Julian Schnabel’s work has been exhibited all over the world.  His paintings, sculptures, and works on paper have been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1982;The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1982; Tate Gallery, London, 1982; Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1987; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, 1987; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1987; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1987; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 1987; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1987; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes, 1989; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, 1989; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1989; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 1989; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1989; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Monterrey, 1994; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1995; Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Bologna, 1996; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt/Main, 2004; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2004; Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma, Helsinki, 2008;  Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, 2009; The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2010; Museo Correr, Piazza San Marco, Venice, 2011; The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, 2013; Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, 2014; Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2014; NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, 2014; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, 2016; Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco, 2018; and Hall Art Foundation, Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg, 2017, 2022 and 2023.

Schnabel, an award-winning film director, has written and directed seven feature films. In 1995, Schnabel wrote and directed his first feature film, Basquiat, about fellow New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The film was released in 1996 and was in the official selection of the Venice Film Festival the same year. Schnabel’s second film, Before Night Falls, based on the life of the late exiled Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas, won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2000 Venice Film Festival and Javier Bardem won the Coppa Volpi for Best Actor. Javier Bardem was also nominated for Best Actor at the 2001 Academy Awards. In 2007 Schnabel directed his third film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  Schnabel received the award for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival as well as Best Director at the Golden Globe Awards, where the film won Best Foreign Language Film.  The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Director. The film was also nominated for seven 2008 César Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actor for which Mathieu Amalric won for his portrayal of Jean-Dominque Bauby.  In 2007, he also made a film of Lou Reed’s Berlin concert at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.  Miral, won the UNESCO as well as the UNICEF award at the 2010 Venice Film Festival.  Miral was shown at the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations.  At Eternity’s Gate (2018), a film about Vincent Van Gogh starring Willem Dafoe had its world premiere at the 2018 Venice Film Festival and was nominated for the Golden Lion Award. Dafoe won the Coppa Volpi at the 2018 Venice Film Festival and was nominated for Best Actor at the Golden Globes and 2019 Academy Awards. Schnabel has recently completed his seventh feature film, In the Hand of Dante, a film adaptation of Nick Tosches’s third novel of the same name, starring Oscar Isaac as well as Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, John Malkovich, Jason Momoa, Al Pacino, and Martin Scorsese. In the Hand of Dante will be released in the 2024/2025 season.

His work is in numerous museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao; Tate Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Kunstmuseum, Basel; Fondation Musée d’ArtModerne, Luxembourg;  Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Hall Art Foundation.

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Julian Schnabel. Photo: Louise Kugelberg, 2016

Based in New York, St John’s paintings engage in a kind of period play. He unpacks the motifs, material standards, and stylistic flourishes of old masters—particularly Rembrandt and Vermeer—using them as visual references to recast those around him, often glamorous queer and trans personalities he discovers on social media. (His most recent show, Ride the Tiger at Caelum Gallery, abounded with such subjects, outfitted in crisp white neck ruffles, jewels, or posed with clusters of grapes).

St John became interested in painting during college, when a friend showed him Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson’s The Sleep of Endymion (1791), based on the ancient Greek narrative. Its themes are enduring—beauty fetishism, possessiveness, the desire to preserve youth or at the very least, stall death—and still intrigue St John. His deft, meticulous and sensuous images, made exclusively with oils, are meditations on classical beauty, image manipulation, fame and time.

In the figurative, time-bending renderings of Will St John, New York personalities—think the actor Hari Nef, actress Patricia Black, gallerist and musician Ruby Zarsky, and the artist’s own children—are cannily inserted into the visual language of Dutch Golden Age masters. In one large-scale portrait, set against a moody sky, the metal bar of a nipple piercing glints on a pale, pert breast; in another, folding drapery is printed with Bape-like camouflage, unrolling in cartoonish clouds of mustard and green.

Photo: Colleen Barry