Julian Schnabel in his studio
12 March 2008
Dear Julian,
Although we don't see each other nearly enough, I feel I know you and your art well. For all the slings and arrows that have been thrown at you, I know also that yours is always a thinking art, generous and necessary and, above all, spontaneous - all qualities too little appreciated in today's calculating world. But your time seems to be coming round again. Like my old British friend the artist Derek Jarman, who died of Aids back in 1994, you take creative refuge in making marvellously stimulating and magnificent movies that manage to go against the grain of that also cliché-ridden industry. But, like Derek, you remain essentially a painter. In other words, you continue to make ambitious works on canvas, paper or indeed on whatever material is to hand - old pieces of cloth, or maybe huge discarded sails. They remain as objects of contemplation onto which you project your essential thoughts, quite often with a single gesture like a great oriental calligrapher and we too can project our own thoughts and feelings, perhaps helped along by your always poetic and evocative titles.
Your new paintings that you are presenting here in this London gallery all share the title 'Christ Last Day'. They evoke that moment that all of us will in all probability one day feel at the moment of agony, a strange feeling of translucence in the hours before death, when we become ourselves, as it were, God as man or woman. Each painting is an altarpiece - an x-ray shroud that seems to be projected onto your polyester canvas and then covered with jet black ink configurations. They aim ambitiously to reveal what normally remains invisible. For it is only in illness or being close to death that we become aware of the inside of our own body - that complex machine that, for all its common structure shared with others, is unique unto itself and full of chance as is nature itself. That was what is so beautiful about the music of chance heard and composed by that seminal American artist John Cage or the spontaneous and feeling poetry of Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass', in both of whose traditions you as an American artist of this generation can so proudly stand. Did you ever hear John Cage read Thoreau's 'Walden's Pond' in front of an audience? You too have a beautiful and decisive voice and I can well imagine you - in your case with a slightly Texan rather than a New England drawl - like Cage reading aloud of 'An old mortality - say, rather, an immortality - with unwearied patience and faith, making plain the image engraven in men's bodies the God of whom they are but defaced and leaning monuments'. This seems to me like a good definition of your new paintings that find a beauty that is within rather than without - an existential rather than an objective visible beauty not dissimilar to your recent magical surfing paintings which give us the feeling of being pitted against unimaginable natural forces that threaten at every moment to overwhelm you and us.
Should art be about danger? Should it describe the borderline between life and death? The answer has to be 'yes' and there are of course any number of ways of doing this, including quite legitimately laying out pills in extended shiny medicine shelves. Throughout the ages the memento mori has taken many forms. After all, what else is a crucifix, other than the archetypal symbol of human death in our culture? It is said to speak of immortality and many artists have depicted it over two thousand years but ultimately it speaks of physical transience. Your new paintings, as you yourself indicate, evoke a crucifixion, a human sacrifice as is ultimately every death, even if the idea of perpetual immortality, except perhaps through
art, is also pretty scary. Which is why art and music, Picasso and Bacon, Stravinsky and Cage, Pound and Auden still address us beyond their creator's death. Occasionally even film has that capacity!!
'Saint Francis in Ecstasy'
You, Julian, have been larger than life in your attitudes, pronouncements and, above all, in your art-making. You go where angels fear to tread, deal with big subjects on a grand scale that always transcend fashion, yet always are of your time and place. In that way you remain forever authentic. I saw these paintings all too briefly on a short visit to your Italian palazzo and studio in the New York sky last November in the company of your handsome young son Vito, whom I chanced upon sitting on the sidewalk in Chelsea having lunch. I joined him and we had a great chat together. It was an unseasonably beautiful, sunny and warm day. I was happy to see your work again in your studio after a long absence, during which time so much has taken place in the wonderful world of art - new artists, new attitudes, which is all as it should be. After all it is more than a quarter of a century since we met at the 'New Spirit in
Painting' exhibition at the Royal Academy, curated by Christos, Nick and myself. You were a central figure in that show. I close my eyes and think back to that historic, life-changing moment, at least in my biography and arguably for the art world itself. I recall your marvellous painting of Saint Francis in Ecstasy- a plate painting, in the bottom half Saint Francis a dignified draped figure in a mountainous landscape accompanied by a skull and a transparent, yet muscular, ghostly red figure rising in the sky. As the catalogue of that show indicated, your work already then amounted to a redefinition of action painting which it still does. But it is an action painting suffused with subject matter both contemporary and existential, always carried out with a lightness of being.
There is a sense of spontaneity in these fluid, monumental x-rays overlaid with free black ink stain and drawing. Ultimately, they assert life just as in your last magnificent film 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly'. These Christ Last Day paintings confront the inevitability of death. May you live a long time yet in creativity.
As ever,
Norman
Norman Rosenthal
London, March 2008
Julian Schnabel Christ's Last Day ATTO II
Until 22 May
Robilant + Voena
38 Dover Street
London W1S 4NL
T +44 (0)207 409 1540
Norman Rosenthal was director of exhibitions for over 30 years at London's Royal Academy of Arts.
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