Word: schnabel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...centuries it has been the purpose of art to make order out of chaos. In the 20th century, perhaps in rebellion against too much order, many artists seek to make chaos out of order. Julian Schnabel [Nov. 1] is a rarity among artists. He makes chaos out of chaos. Like that other 20th century phenomenon, the trash compactor, Schnabel can turn 25 Ibs. of garbage into 25 Ibs. of garbage. He lacks, however, the redeeming feature of the compactor: it reduces the mass of trash...
...were to take a straw poll on th best-known young American artist the winner would certainly be Julian Schnabel, 30. The 1981-82 art season drenched him in publicity: not accidentally, since his main patron is Charle Saatchi, the English advertising man who also takes care of the public image of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party. The art world was diligently sown with rumors that his paintings were selling for $30,000, $50,000 or $75,000, though no one was on record as actually paying such sums for the work of the new stupor mundi...
...Schnabel's work is tailor-made to look...
...from Caravaggio to Joseph Beuys. Its imagery is callow and solemn, a Macy's parade of expressionist bric-a-brac: skulls, bullfights, crucifixes, severed heads. It includes portraits of the likes of Baudelaire, Artaud, Burroughs and other connoisseurs of crisis. It serves up, by implication, the image of Schnabel himself as a young Prince of Aquitaine, albeit a Texan one, sleepless with memory and disillusion, contemplating the wrenched spare parts of history: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." In short, it is pretentious in a blustering all-American way, and through its angst one catches the glint...
...Their grid and curlicues come out of Matisse via Richard Diebenkorn, suffering indignities in translation: the drawing is sloppy, the color mud. There are also some steals from Robert Motherwell, in the form of maps of Europe with overpainting. Such work is homage rendered as cliché; but then Schnabel's reputation rests more on his plate paintings, layer on layer of broken crockery combined with things like antlers and twigs and slathered in paint...