Art Text Assignment

Reviewing ‘The Big Picture, Reconsidering Julian Schnabel’ by Raphael Rubinstein.

"His paradox is to be at once highly visible as a cultural figure and deeply invisible as a painter…A balanced assessment of Schnabel's achievement has been hampered by the difficulty of seeing his work in depth. Astonishingly, Schnabel has not been given a museum exhibition in the U.S. since his Whitney midcareer survey of 1987. "[1]

Raphael Rubinstein, in the essay The Big Picture, Reconsidering Julian Schnabel, argues that Julian Schnabel’s contributions to painting have been overlooked. His reasoning behind this is that Schnabel was already a cultural figure due to his successful filmmaking career at the time, which severely overshadowed the value of his paintings. He surmises that it was hard for critics to see the artist as someone who was contributing to the evolution of Fine Art in America, as opposed to a film maker simply splashing around in the shallows of the already explored elements of painting.

“All paintings suffer from reproduction, but Schnabel's tend to be depleted more than most. The enormous scale of so many of them, which one experiences almost the way one experiences architecture; the disruptive surfaces of the plate paintings, in which images coalesce or break up dramatically depending on one's viewing distance; the textures of his wildly various supports (weathered tarpaulins, pony skin, black velvet, polyester) that invite intensely haptic responses from viewers; a bounty of materials that range from encaustic and glossy resin to deer antlers and antique embroidery—these are all primary facts about the works that get lost in even the best photographic reproductions.”[2]

Rubinstein’s next point is that Schnabel’s works’ suffer from reproduction more than most. His perception is, that due to the extreme materiality and large scale of Schnabel’s work, it is impossible to experience his work as intended unless it is viewed in person. The haptic nature of Schnabel’s works are lost in the digital format. It is his view that the works are also diminished due to the reduction in scale they go through when being reduced for online viewing. Rubinstein believes that the inability to reproduce Schnabel’s works digitally reduced potential interest in the works while also reducing their perceived value to the art world.

“What Schnabel brought to painting was the kind of freewheeling approach to materials that had been pioneered in Post-Minimalist sculpture, and by early 1970s abstract experimenters such as Alan Shields and Harmony Hammond.”[3]

Rubinstein then goes on to propose that the haptic nature of his work was what made Schnabel’s work valuable. The material play found in his paintings was mostly seen in sculpture at the time. Although, due to the inability to capture Schnabel’s work digitally, his interesting use of texture, and non-traditional painting materials was underappreciated

Their size is less an index of Schnabel's "ambition" than of his desire to engage with historic painters who worked, on commission by Church or state, at an architectural scale, or with those who created the "big paintings" of post-war America.[4]

In terms of Schnabel’s scale, Rubinstein’s reasoning is that the decision to make his paintings large was not to do with the artist’s ambition but more to do with his desire to engage with historic painters from Michelangelo through to the Abstract Expressionists, who worked at an architectural scale. The misconception that his use of scale was unrelated to conceptual thinking, may have also hampered interested in Schnabel’s work.

“To read certain images and objects in Schnabel's work as Milagros would mean that, for this artist, the painting is an altar.”[5]

Rubinstein claims that Schnabel’s exposure to the Catholic traditions of Mexico, (as he and his family moved there as a child), impacted the contextual side to his paintings. Milagros, Rubinstein explains are offerings left on Catholic shrines throughout Mexico. In this context, Rubinstein’s argument brings a whole new way of reading Schnabel’s work, adding a layer of context that is easily missed. Understanding Schnabel’s paintings in this sense would again explain his use of large architectural scale, as well as his use of religious imagery.

"I suspect that Schnabel's insistence on what many dismiss as the romantic side of Abstract Expressionism partly accounts for his marginalization: he's like the inconvenient relative who reminds us of a piece of embarrassing family history."[6]

Rubinstein claims Schnabel’s dismissal has a lot to do with Schnabel’s tendency to value the romantic side of art versus the critical side, which was deemed the more important aspect of Fine Art in the 1980s. Rubinstein argues that Schnabel hit a sweet spot, which perhaps the art world was not ready for in his time. The sweet spot being his willingness to allow his human emotion to drive some of his creation while not losing sight of rich contextual relevance.

"We might not have spent so much time playing out the endgames of abstraction; we might have seen the physical components of painting subjected to the same explosion of resources that occurred in sculpture and installation art; we might have enjoyed a wealth of art driven by emotion and empathy rather than by style and theory (but still historically savvy and restlessly experimental)."[7]

Rubinstein’s hypothesis is that Schnabel’s underappreciation could have affected the progression of the neo-expressionist movement. He elaborates that while sculpture at the time valued new experiments with non-traditional materials, painting was stuck using mostly traditional and predictable materials. Schnabel’s use of ceramic, tarpaulin and other unusual materials was unique and enhanced the physicality of his paintings. Rubinstein believes Schnabel’s paintings could have changed the trajectory of painting if he had been seen as a serious painter. He believes that Schnabel was questioning what could be considered a painting in a time where painters were more obsessed with what could be done to push composition and methodology. In retrospect he could be seen as ahead of his time. Although in his time he was considered a notable figure, but as a film maker who painted, not as a painter who also made films.

Bibliography

Rubinstein, Raphael. “The Big Picture Reconsidering Julian Schnabel.” Art in America, March 2011, 110–19. https://discovery.ebsco.com/c/qc5bq2/viewer/pdf/gtvpkyhx3

[1] Rubinstein, Raphael. “The Big Picture Reconsidering Julian Schnabel.” Art in America, March 2011, pg. 111. [2] Ibid. [3] Rubinstein, Raphael. “The Big Picture Reconsidering Julian Schnabel.” Art in America, March 2011, pg. 112 [4] Rubinstein, Raphael. “The Big Picture Reconsidering Julian Schnabel.” Art in America, March 2011, pg. 117 [5] Rubinstein, Raphael. “The Big Picture Reconsidering Julian Schnabel.” Art in America, March 2011, pg. 115 [6] Rubinstein, Raphael. “The Big Picture Reconsidering Julian Schnabel.” Art in America, March 2011, pg. 118 [7] Ibid.