Julian Schnabel: Great Expectations

I sit at the late-August press conference for “Julian Schnabel: Art and Film,” expecting the artist’s arrival. My glasses are pinned to my forehead by eyebrows raised in anticipation. Schnabel has made a profile cut from a pajama wardrobe and hot-air interviews in which unbridled self-aggrandizement has been matched by prophecy. He has been great since the 1980s.

However, there is something disappointing about the Schnabel who enters the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Baillie Court to greet a large ensemble of media. Introducing his first AGO exhibition—and the first to consider correspondences between his dual life as painter and filmmaker—he is dressed and gracious. He wants nothing more than for us to look at the work. Not at him.

The humble turn warrants some surprise. The artist, after all, began his now 40-year career with an application to the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program that was sandwiched between sliced bread. After that, he divided his time between throwing woks in a New York City kitchen and charming art-world luminaries who frequented the place. Barely out of his 30s, he yawped, “I’m as close to Picasso as you’re going to get in this fucking life!”—a proclamation so oft repeated by the press that it makes me wonder if we’re waiting for him to atone or be discredited.

Schnabel’s supersonic rise to art stardom in the late 70s can be attributed to a well-timed entrance and an unwavering commitment to his work—modesty be damned. Indeed, the wilting conceptualism of the time was all but inviting a change of guard. In good company with David Salle, Eric Fischl and Elizabeth Murray, among others, Schnabel and the neo-expressionists assumed post. In short order, Schnabel aided in launching the career of the now-legendary art dealer Mary Boone, and he soon counted Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol among his coterie of friends.

In the mid 90s, he started making commercial films and quickly became an auteur to watch. With three well-received titles—2007’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly earned him an Oscar nomination and an award for best director at Cannes—his latest film, titled Miral, will premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

So it is with deft timing that the AGO planned to open “Art and Film” on September 1. Organized by the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, David Moos, its expansive canvases (some spanning more than six metres) cover Schnabel’s career in painting from the artist’s early, muscled abstractions to his recent cresting surfers and celebrity portraits. You’ll count Johnny Depp among the paintings’ collectors, Gary Oldman and Marlon Brando among their subjects, and glimpse the pieces that made him famous (such as his broken-plate paintings) strung throughout.

I find myself wondering about his sudden turn to modesty. In the gallery, he allows a photographer only a moment before suggesting that they retreat to a less public space. He wants people entering the space “to see the work first. Not me.” Later, upon being asked about Warhol in front of his portrait of the artist, Schnabel offers a response more in keeping with his retreating subject than his own public reputation: “Who was he? I don’t know,” he says, lifting his hands. He gestures to the emaciated Warhol, shirtless and girdled in a pink stomach bandage, pit-skinned. “You tell me. How’s he look?”

Throughout the press conference, he frequently turns to a worn exhibition catalogue when answering questions, flipping through the creased pages to find words belonging to Delacroix, Pier Paolo Pasolini or Marlon Brando in The Godfather—Schnabel remarks, “If you get five bullets in you and you’re still standing, you got to be worth something.” He gives credit widely, generously. And when he gets tired of the talk, we watch him mount a lift and begin tacking posters to the wall alongside several mop-haired twentysomethings who try not to gawk. His selflessness is becoming a bit disconcerting.

He bristles only when a member of the press asks him if his arrival to film, and the change in direction it’s heralded, is associated in any way with his getting older. He balks, shouts “no” a few times, and then tells her to look at the exhibition. Suddenly I see the man: he’s older, matured, but still Julian Schnabel—great in all his impatient youth.