Product Description

Julian Schnabel (b. 1951) is regarded throughout the world as one of the most important artists of our time. He burst onto the neo-expressionist art scene of the early 1980s with huge, arresting paintings on collaged shards of smashed plates, but is probably best known today as a successful filmmaker. His works combine oil painting and collage techniques, classical pictorial elements inspired by historical art, and neo-expressionist features. This volume provides a precise account of Julian Schnabel's artistic output over the last thirty years, describing the personality of a metamorphic and unpredictable artist and his bold, somewhat confrontational style reminiscent of the energy and daring of Picasso and Pollock. From the broken-plate paintings that brought him fame, to the recent, massively scaled Big Girls series, the artist's work is set in the context of his overall sensibility, becoming part of an ongoing pictorial diary of a life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44504 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-10
• Released on: 2009-03-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 432 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Before he became known globally for his work as a filmmaker (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), Julian Schnabel was a painter of works sometimes as large as a movie screen. Although a book cannot replicate the experience of seeing these paintings in person, the book spreads the nearly 200 reproductions generously over its thick glossy pages, each receiving a double-page spread, captioned with just title and date. To give a sense of scale, the book occasionally interrupts a series of paintings with a photograph of the work in location. Eight short essays rush to the defense of their subject, so that his early success with collectors and in the medium of film doesn't tarnish reception of his work. Painter David Salle writes: What set his work apart was his use of fragmented, physically demanding surface, which gave his vision of free association a kind of flickering, tentative quality that insists on the materiality of the painting. An expanded time line at the end of the book does the work of biography while the essays provide segues into the work itself: an interview with Schnabel, a meditation on experience by William Gaddis, a survey of Schnabel's monumental surfing paintings and more. (Mar.)
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About the Author
David Moos is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. He served as Curator of Contemporary Art at Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama. In this position he organized the traveling exhibitions: Jonathan Lasker: Selective Identity, William Wegman: Fashion Photographs, and Radcliff Bailey: the Magic City.

Customer Reviews

An essential Schnabel text
Second only to CVJ: Nicknames of Maitre D's and Other Excerpts from Life this is the go-to book on Julian Schnabel's work. The essays are in virtually all cases well written and add depth and context to Schnabel's painting, while the single interview in the book offers the reader insights into the rapid-fire thought process and canonical knowledge of art history this artist possesses.

The volume is packed with large photos of work from the artist's diverse and wide-ranging oeuvre, including film stills, photographs of his various studios, and work in situ. Seeing Schnabel's work in a range of environments (and especially outside of the gallery setting) is essential to grasping the power of his painting and sculpture.

This is arguably the most comprehensive and far-reaching text on him to date. The book also contains an in-depth timeline of his career along with a variety of quotes, candid photos and family photographs.

This is truly a standard by which oversized artists' books should be measured. Discussions of Schnabel's relevance, talent, and motivations are certainly a hotbed of differing opinion, and future reviews of this title may exhaust such topics, but in the end these issues have little if anything to do with a review of this book.