Julian Schnabel: an audience with the ‘master’, HTSI, FT Weekend, February 2021
Interview with artist Julian Schnabel for a cover feature for the FT Weekend.
Published 24 February 2021
“Boisterous, bombastic and filled with braggadocio. On the publication of a super-sized new monograph, the artist is as combustible as ever.”
Extract
Just after Donald Trump lost the US presidential election, and as he grew obstinate in his refusal to concede, the artist Julian Schnabel turned his attention to two things: a new series of flower paintings (bold pink buds and green leaves, painted over crockery, a glimmer of optimistic blue sky showing through) and a concession speech for the soon-to-be ex-president to deliver, which he emailed to Trump’s daughter Ivanka.
Schnabel reads it to me on FaceTime. “I would like to take this historic and momentous occasion to right things as much as I can,” it goes. “I can’t bring back those we have lost due to the pandemic or those who have suffered because of my decisions. But I can make this right by asking the 70 million people who voted for me to embrace the brightness of this day and help Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the difficult obstacles to come in fixing our magnificent country.” The speech, Schnabel theorises, “could have saved some lives”. Ivanka, to his chagrin, did not reply.
The self-belief required to pivot from artist to unsolicited political speechwriter is typical of Schnabel, a man who has built a career on the conviction that he can do anything, and do it better than anyone else. He has made paintings. He has made sculptures. He has written books. He has directed films, including The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which won two Golden Globes, and the recent van Gogh biopic At Eternity’s Gate, starring Willem Dafoe.
All of these achievements have been brought together in a new monograph, published by Taschen, which is enormous (44cm x 33cm) and costs £750. It is a fitting partnership between a publisher that correlates scale with significance, and an artist whose obsession with size is so renowned it has almost become a performance, a parody of the male ego. A Schnabel canvas – one of his signature plate paintings, full of thick, gorgeously gloopy layers of pigment, or a work rendered over used tarpaulin, found in a Mexican fruit market – can come in at over 6m, and he has hung them on the outside of buildings in order to accommodate the scale. As well as enormity, Schnabel’s art tends to build upon found materials as its starting point, taking things that have a history of their own before they become part of the painting. Hence the crockery, or the sheeting, some of which was studio material first – say, used to cover a painting – and became a canvas later. Over this come gestural brushstrokes, or figures, often icons, or wording. Schnabel is interested in how the meaning of symbols can shift or disappear when context is changed; he has made paintings based on the images from psychological tests, or navigational charts, or the letters of different languages.