Former art world bad boy Julian Schnabel makes a bid for the canon at the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale.
Julian Schnabel, Untitled (Self Portrait), 2004.
“If you live long enough, it can work out nicely,” quips Julian Schnabel when asked to survey his career as a painter. “I had a lot of success early on, and when you’re young and that happens, it pisses a lot of people off...Time goes by and things become a part of the new augmented language of what art is.”
There’s more than a hint of vindication in his voice—and deservedly so. No figure dominated the 1980s New York art world more than Schnabel, and no other figure received more critical abuse. When he wasn’t being pilloried for the soaring six-figure prices his canvases commanded from speculators—many flipped at auction seemingly before their paint was dry—he was drawing fire for being, as The New York Times groaned in one of its many attacks, “overhyped” and “preposterously portentous.” Of course, Schnabel himself didn’t calm matters by famously declaring, “I’m the closest you’ll get to Picasso in this life.”
Francis Picabia, Autoportrait, circa 1940–42.
Three decades on, the curatorial jeers have been replaced by applause, most notably in the form of “Café Dolly: Picabia, Schnabel, Willumsen,” an exhibition opening October 12 at the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale. Positioning a wide array of Schnabel’s portraits alongside early-and mid-20th-century figurative paintings by Denmark’s J.F. Willumsen and France’s Francis Picabia, the exhibit spotlights these three artists as kindred spirits. Indeed, the show’s cocurators—fellow painters Claus Carstensen and Christian Vind, together with Anne Gregerson— see their featured trio as forging and then refining “an unblemished and spotless hyper-modernism.”
It’s best not to ponder this notion too deeply. In a head-spinning catalog essay, Carstensen begins by citing questions of authenticity invoked by the cloned sheep in the show’s title. Gathering theoretical steam, he’s soon hailing Schnabel as having picked up the aesthetic tasks of Leon Trotsky’s revolutionary socialist Fourth International, and saluting him for now carrying the banner for a new “silent Fifth International.” Only in the milieu of contemporary art can the squire of a seven-and-a-half-acre oceanfront estate in Montauk, as well as a three-story luxury compound in the West Village, be deemed a bomb-throwing Bolshevik—even a “silent” one.
J.F. Willumsen, Woman Playing with a Black Cat, 1945.
Instead, the true value of “Café Dolly” is simply that it brings a batch of all too rarely seen artwork to South Florida. Willumsen’s paintings, little known on these shores, are the discovery of the season, marrying sly humor to a visceral visual punch. Picabia may be better known in America, but seeing his giddily louche portraiture in person is always a treat. And the local arrival of Schnabel’s handiwork, now freed from old debates, offers the opportunity for a fresh, unjaundiced look—particularly for those eyes more familiar with his career’s ’90s turn to feature filmmaking.
Julian Schnabel, Untitled (Self Portrait with Big Girl, Montauk), 2004.
As for the connections across the years between the three artists, count Schnabel among the intrigued—but he’s willing to play along. “Willumsen died in 1958. Picabia died in 1953. I was born in 1951,” he muses. “So it’s pretty interesting when you think that these guys never knew what I was going to do. But time is incongruous to art, art keeps going...It’s bigger and more sprawling than what’s contained in the linear thinking of people that are trying to put things in boxes.”“Café Dolly: Picabia, Schnabel, Willumsen” is on display October 12 through February 1, 2015, at the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, 1 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale, 954-525-5500