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Abstract
A major exhibition of Julian Schnabel’s work was staged in the early months of 1987 at the National Museum of Modern Art in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, featured forty paintings and three sculptures. This review by Jérôme Sans gives a brief overview of Schnabel’s life and career, his discovery of both the European old masters—Cimabue, El Greco, Caravaggio—and new masters like Sigmar Polke, Joseph Beuys. Sans finds in Schnabel’s painting an affirmation that 1970s Minimalism had run its course.
Notes
1 Translator’s note: the family moved to Texas when Schnabel was in his late teens.
2 Translator’s note: Sans is referring to the Bruno Bischofberger Gallery. Bischofberger (born 1940) is a Swiss art dealer and gallerist; from the 1960s onwards he was closely associated with Andy Warhol and brought the work of many important American artists to Europe.
3 Translator’s note: Leo Castelli (1907 – 1999) established his eponymous gallery in a New York townhouse in 1957.
4 Translator’s note: Schnabel describes painting as “a means of transgressing death” in the catalogue for the Whitechapel Gallery outing of the same show in 1986.
5 Translator’s note: René Ricard (1946–2014) was a poet and art critic who was part of Andy Warhol’s coterie.
6 Translator’s note: more usually called Painting Without Mercy.
7 Translator’s note: “painting to end painting” Marden wrote in one of his 1960s diaries and notebooks.
8 Translator’s note: to clarify, the Prado is in Madrid.
9 Translator’s note: a bar in the Gothic quarter of Barcelona.
10 Translator’s note: the reference is to Pollock’s ‘all-over drip paintings.’
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jérôme Sans
Translated from French by Susan de Muth Originally published as “Julian Schnabel: Le Mythe déferle,” in Beaux-Arts, no 43 (1987): 55-59.