Julian Schnabel

Julian Schnabel – Painting and drawing to combat boredom and loneliness

Julian Schnabel was born in New York City on 26 October 1951. The son of a wealthy Jewish businessman, he spent his early years in Brooklyn, but moved with his two elder siblings and parents to Brownsville, Texas in 1965. Schnabel found the remoteness of the rural setting stressful and to distract himself he turned to surfing – and painting. In 1969, he began studies at the University of Houston after which he returned to New York and took part in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum. Despite his enthusiasm for art, Schnabel had to pay his way with a job as cook in Mickey Ruskin’s Ocean Club Restaurant, but the breakthrough was foreseeable: After study visits to France, Spain and Germany, he established himself in the 1980s as the wild boy of the art scene – as a dazzling, egocentric figure who painted on velvet and animal skins. 

A steep career on a large scale

With his cheeky arrogance, Julian Schnabel quickly hit the mark with the nouveau riche high-flyers on Wall Street who chose him as their favourite artist, paying large sums of money for his artworks. He was a guest at the Venice Biennale and in 1981, the youngest participant at the exhibition A New Spirit in Painting, where his works where showed alongside those of Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Pablo Picasso, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. Schnabel saw himself also as a genius and cultivated a corresponding appearance. He liked to tie his brush to a broomstick and swing it with great force over large, usually uneven surfaces such as porcelain or broken glass. He preferred to paint outside as only there could he find the desired light conditions. While doing so - and generally - he liked to wear white pyjamas. The foyer of the Frankfurt Opernturn has been adorned since 2010 with his monumental painting Ahab, which the artist created on a thirteen-meter-wide and twelve-meter-high canvas. 

Successful forays into film

Julian Schnabel has also worked occasionally as a director, with great success, producing for example film portraits of the artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Reinaldo Arenas. He was nominated for an Oscar in 2000 - but did not win – but in 2007, his biography of the former editor of the fashion magazine Elle, Jean-Dominique Bauby, won the directing prize at the Cannes Film Festival. He has designed album covers for the musicians Lou Reed and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and counts amongst his friends and admirers visual artists, musicians and actors including world-famous names such as Bono, William Dafoe, Al Pacino and Emanuelle Seigner. Schnabel lives alternately in Spain and New York where he owns, amongst others, a former perfume factory which he has had converted into a Venetian palace. His son is the gallerist and art dealer Vito Schnabel who caught media attention with his intermittent liaison with the German model Heidi Klum. Schnabel himself also treasures beautiful women – since 2010, the model Lykke May Andersen in particular.