Julian Schnabel

Since the mid-1970s, Julian Schnabel's paintings have rarely represented coherent stories. In recent years, however, narratives have crept into his work as a consequence of his experience as a filmmaker. Narrative is especially pronounced in his recent series "Simplify Your Life," due in great part to the source material used for the paintings: a set of mid-nineteenth-century French wallpaper panels depicting British General Charles Cornwallis's surrender to General George Washington in Yorktown, Virginia. Schnabel scanned the vintage wallpaper, enlarged it, and printed it on polyester, which he then stretched into canvases as the surface for the paintings in this series. Using thick brushes strapped to a long stick, he looped arabesques of purple ink onto each backdrop, then dappled them with blossoms of pink and white paint. The simultaneous presence of two image layers conflates two narratives-the sequential depiction of the historical scene on the decorative backdrop and the dynamic progress of animated abstract marks from panel to panel.

The background represents the final land battle of the American Revolution, when the future of the nascent nation was mere anticipation. The active brushstrokes on top of the scene create a sensation of immediacy that brings the works to the viewer's present. One senses that all the history that occurred after Washington's triumph is sandwiched between the backdrop and Schnabel's abstract gestures. White borders frame the panoramic landscapes, as if the scenes were being viewed through a window. Schnabel contradicts this framing element by treating the entire surface equally, allowing the ink and paint to splatter and stain the white borders and the historic scene alike. This democratic treatment of the surface creates an uncanny experience for the viewer of being inside an interior and outside at the same time. In his 1987 autobiography CVJ, Schnabel attributed the schizoid vision of time and place endemic to most of his work to splitting his youth between Brooklyn, New York, where he was born in 1951, and Brownsville, Texas, where his family relocated in 1965. As a child he was part of a homogenous community of Eastern European Jews, but at age fourteen he suddenly found himself navigating a fragmented and alienating small town bordering Mexico. As a result of this cultural dislocation, Schnabel felt he existed in both the past and the present, and in two places at once. Making art became his way to touch on these sensations and emotions. The found materials Schnabel uses additionally contribute to his dissolution of space and time. He has appropriated and adapted weathered Italian shop awnings, photographs of ancient ruins, and Kabuki theater curtains, among countless other existing materials. These materials expediently establish the painting's authenticity of place and the patina of age, yet their ethnographic or historic references, like the scene of the American Revolution in the "Simplify Your Life" works, might seem exotic and remote to the present-day viewer.

Bonnie Clearwater