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The painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel loves the Engadine. In the gallery of his son Vito, Schnabel shows a new group of works and explains why he wanted to use it to remember a deceased friend.

This time he doesn’t come in the pajamas he usually wears on film galas. There is knee-deep snow in St. Moritz. Julian Schnabel trudges into the gallery in his winter coat. The fur shoes open, a St. Moritz fan sweater and white overalls peek out from under the coat. A worn cap protects the head. Those who look like this will find their way home even from the deepest forest, they have the wilderness within themselves. But before one can make a comment, the artist gets down to business. His eyes are awake like a bird of prey in flight. In a very short time he checks the hanging of his pictures, corrects the lighting and asks what people think of the works.

Six times one sees dark trees there, the trunks and branches of which cast even darker shadows between a bright yellow ground and a deep blue sky. Drunk to death and a cry for life at the same time. You know, those are the gnarled trees in the garden of the hospital in Saint-Rémy, which Vincent van Gogh painted over and over again. So someone can't get away from his film success, which he celebrated with “At Eternity's Gate”, you think. In 2018 Schnabel caused a sensation with the biopic, in which Willem Dafoe played the famous painter.

It's true, Schnabel has been obsessed with Van Gogh for the last few years; He's obsessive anyway, that's part of his art. First he painted the roses near his grave. Partly in huge formats. Now it was the turn of the trees at the hospital in Saint-Rémy. The fact that he was painting on broken glass again points back to his beginnings. In the end, that was the coup with which he surprised everyone at the end of the 1970s: Jackson Pollock dripped the paint onto the canvas, Schnabel glued broken pieces onto wooden panels and painted over them. What a fire!

At that time he was considered the enfant terrible of the New York art scene. When he came to the metropolis in 1973 as a tanned surfer from Texas, Andy Warhol made portraits of Mick Jagger and John Lennon, celebrities stormed the nightclub Studio 54, and a new, expressive energy captured painting. It was the years before AIDS and Ronald Reagan. "I was fortunate enough to meet a lot of inspiring people," says Schnabel today.

That he hit the city like a tornado, sweeping away whatever stands in his way, he acknowledges with a wave of his hand. He was young, fresh and endowed with enormous self-confidence. He established himself as a painter for large formats, who paints what art history has to offer and experiments with all conceivable materials. He's also once bought roofs of houses or truck tarpaulins to paint on. Since he has also been making films, receiving the Cannes directing award and being considered an Oscar nominee, he has become known to the general public.

Tribute to a friend

The fact that for many years he was to be found almost as often in the gossip columns as in the art press that he lived as a painter prince with a Renaissance palazzo in New York is now a thing of the past. "I almost never go to dinners anymore," he says. He wants to paint and works out how many summers he still has with his 69 years for it. He came to St. Moritz from Montauk.

In the small town at the far end of Long Island, he has long been spending the summers working in his open-air studio: "Outside, I see the effect of the colors much better," he says. The bright contrasts on the new paintings are evidence of this. The broken dishes reinforce them. Many of them are not painted over, the white of the porcelain reflects the light while the colors swallow it up.

The pictures were created as a memory of a close friend. The well- known Africa photographer Peter Beard wanted to show Schnabel a book with photos of the trees near the hospital that van Gogh had already seen. Before he had found it, he did not return home one evening: he was slightly demented and lost in the dark; his body was discovered two weeks later. When Beard's wife discovered the book and brought it to Julian Schnabel, he wanted to erect a memorial to his friend and painted the trees as an homage to both of them.

Van Gogh's heat and Julian Schnabel's grief can be seen in St. Moritz. “You belong here, this is my home,” he says. In 1979 he came to the Engadin for the first time. The gallery owner Bruno Bischofberger had invited him. Since then he's been here almost every year. He lives with his wife, the interior designer Louise Kugelberg, in the “Villa Flor” in S'chanf. "Now we're alone there." That helps in the pandemic. He has a studio nearby. “I can ski and paint, that's wonderful,” he says.

His son Vito took over the former gallery space from Bischofberger. Selling his pictures is no problem for the painter: “He has a good program, and it's not that unusual. Pierre Matisse also sold his father's works. " It has to be Matisse. Or just van Gogh.

I am my pictures

Schnabel painted many of the pictures for the Van Gogh film himself. And asked oneself: "What is different if I paint a dead painter from his self-portrait, or if I portray an actor as this painter?" Apart from the fact that Dafoe has a beard, unlike Vincent, you can see how much Schnabel empathized with his deceased colleague. "I've been concerned with death since I was a child, it's my big topic," he says. The volume, which Taschen-Verlag publishes at the end of the month, impressively presents the portrait series.

Today's artist not only reflected himself in his past life, he also got along better with it. But that is not new for Schnabel: “I am my pictures”, he says van Gogh's sentence about himself.

The Sad Lament of the Brave, Let the Wind Speak and Other Paintings is an enlarged iteration of the exhibition presented by Pace earlier this year, and postponed days later due to the surging pandemic. Included are 11 recent paintings made at the artist’s studio in Montauk, six of which have not been exhibited before. The largest paintings here envelope the viewer and establish a place or environment in the gallery somewhat like the outdoor walls the artist created as a studio to surround himself with the works in progress. The scale is that of Abstract Expressionist or European history painting. Yet there is ease in an often-sparse painterly gesture that is more familiar in small scale in rapidly made works as opposed to the usual progressive accumulation of marks in large-scale gestural painting. These contradictions are interesting.

There is something in Julian Schnabel’s work that recalls Francis Picabia’s “Transparencies” series, paintings from the 1920s in which Picabia experimented with Dada and abstraction, and Joe Overstreet’s 1960s exploration of canvas stretched out into three dimensions. More distantly, they evoke the use of found materials as painting support with the Catalonians Anthony Tàpies and Joan Miró. The paintings aim for a transcendent communication beyond a simple articulation of self or statement of content. Apropos this, James Nares quotes Antonin Artaud in the exhibition catalog, “gesture is itself an idea.” Picabia said of his own work, “I want my painting where all my instincts may have free course.” The trust in intuition when pursuing a fleeting impulse, the spontaneity, and responsiveness to material on a scale that precludes correction are typical of Julian Schnabel’s approach to painting. Abstraction like this is both visceral and transcendent—using material, image, and text (the titles in this case) to communicate.

The paintings are made using lonas cotton fabric sourced from a Mexican fruit market, where they were placed to protect vendors and customers from the fierce sun that weathered and discolored the fabric. Held aloft with tent poles, which have left their marks, the fabric is re-stretched over frames that shape the painting support. Already marked, stained, and repaired, the fabric offers a non-neutral, activated ground on which to work. Thinking about the origin of these grounds from a different culture or class is one reading, ultimately depending on the viewer. Míro’s use of worker’s sackcloth as a support for some of his modernist anti-painting compositions is comparable. The class politics of the exploitation of this particular found material may be relevant, although that is not always the case—for example, consider David Hammons’s use of found building site tarps with abstract gestural painting.

Preschool and Afterschool (2018) is 128 by 213 1/2 inches in size. The dark pink, torqued rectangle of fabric, with seams, discoloration, and patch repair is traversed by violet biomorphic shapes in oil paint that cross each other, overlapping, and a wide white gesso line that acts like a pictorial redaction—which doesn’t hide anything itself—rather it disrupts by being assertively on the surface without contributing to the otherwise painterly spatial illusion. Why not I (2019) is one of four paintings from the “Why not” series, all made this time with the same fabric on regular rectangular stretchers. It comprises a group of painterly shapes that dance before a horizon, or before a wall. The illusion of abstract, surreal space is clear, whilst the paint is direct and unfussy with the addition of ink that stains a shadow like form.

The Road (2020) has along its top edge a protuberance, partially painted red, like a volcano or a wound. The other shapes in the painting also read ambiguously, inviting different constellations of meaning whilst remaining explicitly painterly events. For example, is the white gesso shape—brushed and spilled—a bird on a wire or a ghost on a tightrope? Most likely neither. Despite the undeniably heroic scale and boldness, the paintings have as much to do with self-effacement in the circumstance of unknown experience as an adventure or foil, a falling into form and a finding of balance however precarious, or transitory. A new place is acknowledged via intuitive responsiveness and not calculated construction—painting as a concrete shadow, fugitive and yet fixed.

The Patch of Blue the Prisoner Calls the Sky is Julian Schnabel’s first show in the new Pace Gallery, and he knocks the viewer for a loop. His title derives from Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898), either a misquotation or a faulty memory of the original. Wilde famously wrote the poem when he was in prison for “gross indecency,” but while he was there, a fellow prisoner was hanged for murdering his wife. In the poem, Wilde slowly identifies himself with the murderer, eventually coining the famous line, “Each man kills the thing he loves.”

The relationship between Wilde and Schnabel’s 13 paintings is mysterious, even though three of these brilliant works are titled The Patch of Blue the Prisoner Calls the Sky (2019). The relevant passage, about the wife-murderer, appears four times in the poem:

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.

The metamorphosis of Wilde’s “tent of blue” into Schnabel’s “patch of blue” is important because it speaks directly to Schnabel’s artistic recycling of found material, both in the sense of ideas and in the sense of real substances incorporated into the work. In Wilde, the line refers to the murderer’s lost freedom, but for Schnabel, it becomes a recurring motif: all three paintings include a patch of blue, obfuscated by “drifting clouds” of white. So, the poem is simultaneously present and absent in the paintings.

Out-of-context quotation in art and architecture is characteristic of the postmodern condition, but Schnabel’s relationship with antecedents is complex. Here, he alters a line to fit his intentions, but elsewhere he shows himself to be a past master of painterly parody. His “Big Girl” (2001) pictures are a send-up of portraiture and his “rose paintings” (2015) mock floral still lifes. But they are all tour-de-force enterprises in themselves. So, Wilde’s “little tent of blue” comes home ironically to roost in these works, all made from “toldos,” weathered cotton awnings Schnabel bought from produce vendors near his Mexico studio in Troncones.

The 13 paintings here fall into three discrete groups: five untitled works of uniform (84” x 65) size, three “patch of blue” paintings, also uniform in size (approximately 108” x 90”), and five large-scale paintings, four titled Lagunillas (2018) and one Preschool and Afterschool (2018). In the gallery, the eight smaller works stand apart from the large ones and are really creatures of a different order.

James Nares, in his touching and insightful catalogue essay, points out that five of the eight are made from two pieces of fabric sewn together and that the stitch line “evokes a horizon.” This line, created by chance, turns the painterly space into a de Chirico-like land or cityscape. In Untitled I (2019), for instance, masses of color interact like characters in Joan Miró’s Dutch interior paintings of 1928, also reworkings of “found” material. But where Miró retains figurative elements, Schnabel lets color do the talking. The weather-beaten awnings come bearing colors, but Schnabel enhances them and departs from them in yet another metamorphosis.

The “patch of blue” paintings contain no horizon lines, so they are a playing field for color masses. In this case, the matter of rhythm, the careful placement of certain shades, is of primary importance. The Patch of Blue the Prisoner Calls the Sky III (2019) is a dialectical struggle between yellow and pink, with blue and white seeking to mediate between them. Gestural without being violent, this painting captures an instant of artistic illumination.

The very large paintings are all irregularly shaped because of the found nature of the awning material. The most fascinating is the last, the strangely titled Preschool and Afterschool (2018), a huge 128” x 213” irregular rectangle. The found fabric, painted with oil and gesso, is primarily in a pinkish mauve, interrupted by black and white. The white, rectangular swath we recognize as the same that covers the eyes of the “big girls”; the black shapes are variously biomorphic and abstract. Here, Schnabel “signs” the found fabric surface with marks related to himself, the supreme alchemist.

Way back in the ’80s, Julian Schnabel took, in the words of Mick Jagger, more than his “fair share of abuse.” He has not only survived, but prevailed.

Laurie Anderson has been working and performing in many different mediums since the 1970s, when she came of age in a downtown New York milieu in which art forms expanded and boundaries between genres began to blur. She became a pop music star when her song “O Superman” hit the charts in 1981 and helped propel her album Big Science into the new wave canon, but she never ceded her avant-garde credentials as she continued to experiment and collaborate widely. In 2015, at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, she presented a high-profile staging of Habeas Corpus, a multimedia installation work that included video footage of Mohammed el Gharani, who had been detained by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay for more than seven years and struggled to find freedom after he was released. A restaging of that piece will feature in a major survey of Anderson’s work opening in May at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

Julian Schnabel—who got to know Anderson by way of her late husband, musician Lou Reed; they were married from 2008 until his death in 2013—rocketed to fame as a painter in the ’80s, when his big, brash, and expressionistic style ran counter to convention in the New York art world at the time. In recent years, he also established himself as a filmmaker, with features including Basquiat, Before Night Falls, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (which was nominated for four Academy Awards), and At Eternity’s Gate, the latter starring Willem Dafoe as Vincent van Gogh. Schnabel has a show of paintings, opening March 6 and running through April 18 at Pace Gallery in New York, that features large new works made on materials procured in Mexico.

Both artists joined ARTnews in conversation at Anderson’s home in Greenwich Village.

ARTnews: What is the earliest formative memory you have of an experience with art?

Laurie Anderson: Her name was Mrs. Himmelfarb and she was a painter in our town. She was teaching kids to paint, and I was watching her paint tomatoes. She said, “Kids, you’ve got to make them really big! They’ve got to be like they taste!” She had the most joyful feeling about it. I remember her studio was just an absolute mess. Gertrude Himmelfarb, from Glen Ellyn, Illinois—a painter who did mostly tomatoes.

Julian Schnabel: Why paint anything else?

Anderson: They were unbelievable. Do you remember the first work of art you saw?

Schnabel: I spent a lot of time by myself when I was little because my brother and sister were much older. I spent a lot of time drawing, under the table in my kitchen. I had a world under there. You know the magazines that said, “If your son can draw a horse’s head in a paddock, then maybe he’s talented and can go to a famous art school”? My mother asked me to draw something like that, and the fact that I could do that was a sort of Pavlovian beginning. It was something my mother liked—so I ended up doing it more.

The first major painting I remember seeing was Aristotle with a Bust of Homer by Rembrandt at the Met. There was light coming out of the painting. The light was emanating. It seemed like something I wanted to get close to—and also the dark space within.

ARTnews: How did the two of you first meet?

Schnabel: We both knew Gordon Matta-Clark. He was with a performance artist at the time who didn’t need her big studio and rented it to me so I could paint. Gordon used to come over, and he saw some paintings I was doing—really not like things people were making in his group at the time. He was very nice and introduced me to [gallerist] Holly Solomon.

Anderson: Did you ever show with her?

Schnabel: I was in a group show called “Surrogates/Self-Portraits,” in 1977. Were you in that show?

Anderson: I think so. How do you find out for sure? It’s slipped through the mists of time…

Schnabel: I would say yes. I had a painting in that show called … I don’t know if Jack the Bellboy was in that show. It might have been. Or it was that Pisa painting, an orange one with a poplar tree in the middle. The orange one she sold for $700. I bought it back years ago.

Anderson: Oh, I know what I had in that: Self-Portrait into the Edge of a Mirror. Looking into the edge of mirrors sideways puts your head into this really odd sort of grotesque split.

Schnabel: We were on different paths immediately. Anyway, Gordon got sick and he was dying of pancreatic cancer. Laurie used to come over and visit him, so I would see her regularly. But we never really talked. I knew of her but never really until Lou and Laurie got together. Then we started seeing each other a lot.

ARTnews: Had you known Lou Reed before?

Schnabel: I actually met Lou quite late [in 1987], but I felt like we always knew each other.

Anderson: Like brothers.

Schnabel: I had this idea of making a requiem for Andy Warhol and I told John Cale at Andy’s wake. He spoke to Lou about it and told me that Lou said he thought I would take it over, so he didn’t want me to be involved.

Anderson: That sounds like something Cale would say about Lou—not necessarily something Lou would say. . .

Schnabel: I saw Lou at a screening somewhere and said, “You know, it’s weird, you and John are going to do this thing, but it was my idea—and I heard you didn’t want me to be involved.” He said, “I never said that!” Ultimately, John and Lou made a beautiful record out of it called Songs for Drella. Lou and I didn’t meet until Andy died, but once we did, it was like a house on fire. He was so familiar to me—and me to him—that we became very, very close. You always got the ball back in your court with him.

ARTnews: What do you mean by “ball back in your court”?

Schnabel: If you had a question, you got a good answer. He didn’t miss anything. He was really listening. He didn’t miss a beat. It felt like you were in the presence of some really great intelligence, and he was also warm. He has a reputation for being irascible or curmudgeonly, but I can tell you he was so sweet to me—always. I could ask him anything and there was nothing he wouldn’t do.

Anderson: When you mentioned your painting Jack the Bellboy, I immediately thought of Lou’s songs, because he had this way of looking at people that you do too. I can imagine a song by Lou called “Jack the Bellboy” in a second. He had this curiosity in looking at other people and wondering, Who are you? What are your interests? Why are you like that? He wanted to know, not for some ego-driven reason but out of real curiosity.

Schnabel: He had insight into all sorts of things, and he had a lot of heart. Berlin, the record he made in 1973, was one of my favorite records ever—it was like the soundtrack to my life for a long while. The sadness in it just filled me up and made me feel like, If I’m going crazy, it’s OK—he survived. I didn’t know at that time that I was going to be a filmmaker, but I thought, If I ever do make a movie, I’d like to make a film of Berlin. Then time went by, things happened, and, ultimately, after 30 years of knowing each other, we made one.

ARTnews: How did that come to pass?

Schnabel: I was making The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Lou said someone wanted to put out a production at St. Ann’s Warehouse and asked me if I would do the sets. I was in France and had all of these paintings in my studio of Chinese wallpaper prints that I wanted to put around the stage, and I said it would cost $16,000 to send this stuff over. He said they didn’t have that, so I said, “OK, forget it—you and me will finance this thing. We will put in $50,000 apiece and pay for the shipping and whatever else, and we will own it.”

It was funny because, a couple days before Lou died, we were sitting on the couch watching it together. He got a real jolt out of it. He was just mesmerized, and he said, “Who paid for this? The authors!”

ARTnews: Both of you are strongly associated with New York City in different ways. What is your opinion of the city now?

Anderson: I was just in Berkeley and Alice Waters gave me a book about Chez Panisse, and it hit me so suddenly and so hard how much New York has changed. There’s this free speech movement in Berkeley and all these people doing music and art and food and politics—radical politics. New York used to be so communal. Now everyone is doing their own professional careerism and it is just utterly different. I wonder how I can make a Berkeley in New York, because that is really what I want to do—to be in a situation based more on friendship with people and doing things rather than career-oriented stuff all the time.

Schnabel: I think you try to make yourself available. When you were reading recently at the Brooklyn Public Library, you were sticking your head out and opening your arms and saying to everybody, “We are in a situation, and we’re all in it together. I’m willing to say something about it. What do you have to say?”

Anderson: That was something called “The Size of the Con,” about the corporate art world and corporate cultural world and what’s happened. It’s a long text. But then, just last night, I played John Zorn’s scene at the Brooklyn Stone. Zorn is a communal guy, and it was great—just a hole in the wall, where you can make music that really sounds different. Last week we played at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A., and that is a big corporate scene.

Schnabel: What you are open to is connecting with people. When somebody performs, it is very different than if you are painting in a studio, and you have this way of communicating with people where you actually bring a sense of community with you. You have groups. You invite people over. You want to communicate. It is part of your temperament. At the same time, you give birth to communication for other people too—and it goes into your work. Willem Dafoe said something about being an actor: “When I am doing it, I feel like I’m awake. I want to be awake.” I think your way of being awake is to bring other people along with you, like that notion of New York when we were younger.

ARTnews: How is the city most different to you now?

Schnabel: It’s a pity because I know that Lola, my daughter—she grew up in the city and knows a bunch of people—I feel like they like leaving the city rather than being in it. I feel like the outside pressure of what we were talking about—careerism—hovers over and dismantles that kind of friendship. Sometimes I think of Instagram and what happens with people showing whatever the hell they do. Like eating a hot dog—oh, far out!

Then I think of someone like James Nares in 1976. He had this wrecking ball attached to a cable that was tied to that bridge that goes across Harrison Alley [in Tribeca], and this fucking ball is going back and forth while he films it. He did all the camera work himself. There was a guy who spent some time doing that during the day, and then he just goes home and goes to sleep. But he does it, films it, and then it is there. There’s a kind of integrity to the gesture. It was not designed for people to just digest it immediately and spit it out.

Anderson: On the other hand, I was just invited to do something with musicians and ironworkers in Brooklyn—they’re setting trombones on fire and sawing things in half while playing them. I was like, “Wait a second, that sounds like Gordon Matta-Clark.” So there’s still stuff going on.

Schnabel: You can put down cement, but art will creep up through the cracks. But obviously, unfortunately, fascism and greed are enemies of art. We are living in a time when that shit is breaking up communities and the kind of flexibility young people need to be themselves.

Anderson: I think it’s partly generational. All of us are lonelier and more stressed out.

Schnabel: But your work engenders something that is alive. People can see my paintings and the paintings will stay there—it’s a rudimentary quality of painting. It doesn’t matter if I have another show. But in what you do, there’s something like electricity, and part of what you are doing is, in the present, getting at something that has a cause and effect. It effects change—and makes people feel liberated. That’s amazing. You’re going to kill me because I have so much affection for you, but you have this unfathomable energy and desire to share that really changes people’s lives.

Anderson: That’s music. It comes from music—a very emotional and communal thing. There’s nothing like live music. And now museums are trying to do music, which is just awful, usually. They don’t have good sound systems. There’s no place to sit. It doesn’t work. It’s weird.

ARTnews: Speaking of museums, what are you putting forth in your Hirshhorn show—and how significant is its setting in Washington, D.C.?

Anderson: It’s significant to be in the middle of the fray. It’s not a retrospective, and it’s shaded toward the political. There are some “Personal Service Announcements” that I did a long time ago. It was interesting to do those because Warner Bros. wanted me to do some video for a record, but instead of doing that I said I was going to do personal announcements. They had nothing to do with the record—they were about things like the national debt. But they just thought, Here’s an artist doing a video and we can put it on MTV. It was really satisfying to do something in a big context like that and yet be subversive. We are also going to remount Habeas Corpus [a 2015 video installation featuring footage of Mohammed el Gharani, who had been detained by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay]. I went over to meet Mohammed, who is having a really hard time still. Every time he goes back to Chad he is arrested and tortured. He has been in 10 countries since he was out of prison.

Schnabel: Can’t he just stay in one place where he is safe?

Anderson: He’s not safe anywhere. They have agents following him around. It’s criminal what we are doing to those people. It is not enough to just keep them in there for 10 years and torture them, but make sure that they can never go anywhere and be safe. We updated his story when I went over last summer and shot some stuff with him. I don’t know how it’s all going to come off—I have no idea.

Schnabel: Are you scared to speak up? Are you scared to show what you want to show? Are you going to compromise what you’re going to show because of fear? I would say no. You seem to be the most fearless person I know.

Anderson: I have a lot of fear.

Schnabel: But you are always going to be provocative and you’re not going to compromise because you think it is too radical. You’re going to say what you have to say.

Anderson: One thing is that a museum is not really my world. It’s all of these white walls, and I come from a place where everything is dark. One of the things we’re going to do is make some of the spaces dark to show a combination of a lot of things that I hope hang together. It’s problematic for some people because there are paintings, film, music, politics. For a lot of people that’s confusing.

ARTnews: Do you have confidence that art can still enter into the broader political conversation?

Anderson: One thousand percent—it just does it differently than other things. What is radical action now? I’m going to unlike you on Facebook—whoa, wow, that’s amazing. But there’s nothing worse than somebody saying, “those old days in the ’60s.” Who wants to hear about that? In Brooklyn last night, traffic was backed up. Why? Because there was a huge demonstration spread out over the whole city. There were all of these people marching in the streets, for the FTP group, and I thought, Don’t underestimate what’s going on.

ARTnews: What for you is most pressing politically?

Anderson: The justice system in this country—people have lost a huge amount of confidence in it. You could just watch the impeachment and realize there is no justice system. It’s not about justice—it’s about power and money. Justice is almost an antiquated concept. Chelsea Manning is one of my heroes, and I was on a panel in Houston with all of these women who had been imprisoned—Chelsea, Pussy Riot, a bunch of other people. It was so wild to learn what the experience of prison for women was like. The guy who was running the panel asked, “What did you learn in prison?” And they all said the same thing: “I learned to depend on other people, and that they would help me.” Who says that? Most people would say “I want revenge” or whatever. But they said they learned to depend on each other. Only women prisoners would say that, and that’s something to listen to—these women who are not pounding a desk and saying, “everything is wrong!” There were saying: “People help you.”

ARTnews: Julian, new paintings that you’re showing at Pace Gallery were made on materials from Mexico. What drew you to them as a different kind of medium?

Schnabel: The paintings are on cotton material of a kind that was covering up a fruit market in a jungle. They were tied with ropes in a village in the middle of nowhere, to block the sun so that people can sell oranges or have a toy store. People find whatever can work for them and sew it together, and the sun burnt the material and made this incredible color—I was drawn to that. I was driving and saw this pink material, so I bought it and went to some other markets from one small town to the next. They were very happy to sell them, and I guess I see something in the material that is an opportunity. It’s a palimpsest. It has history—there is a story in it. When I started working in Mexico, I tied the material between palm trees, and it made an irregular shape. The sun had made images of itself radiating in parts that were hidden because they were tied in knots. When it was unraveled, these rays were going out, and then I responded. But I’ve been painting on found objects and materials for a long time…

ARTnews: What do you like most about that material as a surface?

Schnabel: The color is amazing—it seems like lightning. You can’t make a color like that. I’m always surprised when I look at painting that looks so generic because people accept materials and ways of working that are not a surprise. I made a painting of Willem Dafoe for the movie about Vincent van Gogh. I had to make a painting of him as a prop in the movie, and then I noticed that van Gogh made paintings of his own paintings, so I thought maybe I could do that—and made a painting of Willem as van Gogh as a plate painting. So I’m painting an image that is recognizable from a painting that I’m looking at. But working on these other paintings, I’m not looking at anything, so there is a kind of freedom that is more evident. But when you conform to an image that you might be seeing, that is also a port of embarkation because when you start painting it, it becomes something you never figured you would do. Your hand and your mind are working, but something in the middle of all that is occurring—which is the same thing as when you are hitting a note or making a sound. It has to do with your unconscious or your subconscious—or that space in between.

ARTnews: You taught Willem to paint for his role in At Eternity’s Gate. What was that process like?

Schnabel: If he was sitting here he would say, “He taught me how to see.” When we sat down and looked at a tree, his first impulse was to draw the whole tree. I said, “Don’t try to do that—just look where the light is hitting and just paint the light. Do you see shadows in there? Paint that part now…” If people are going to watch a movie about a painter, they better believe the guy’s painting. You know, Willem was not scared to act—but he was scared to paint.

ARTnews: Lest it be like watching an actor who obviously doesn’t smoke fumbling with a cigarette.

Schnabel: That’s true. In Before Night Falls, there was a guy who was supposed to smoke a cigarette in a kind of arabesque moment and I watched him, this fucker, put the cigarette in … I said, “Is there somebody around here who actually smokes?!” It’s amazing how difficult it is to have somebody do the simplest thing. But through repetition you can abandon something at a certain moment and do something you didn’t do before. Or you can hope for that. Once I started making these van Gogh paintings, I was discovering something about painting that I hadn’t done before—and I was discovering something about van Gogh that I thought I had known but now know more deeply. Maybe that is why people make art. They are looking for something they didn’t know.

Anderson: We are all looking. When you see somebody paint something you have never seen before, that is the greatest feeling of freedom. That changes your mind more than anything. Somebody might drone on about freedom, and then you just see something that is really free and think, Oh, that’s what it looks like. You get the feeling of it—and not by talking about it endlessly.

Julian Schnabel’s first film, “Basquiat,” was released in the summer of 1996. In it, Willem Dafoe plays a minor role as a struggling electrician who un-coincidentally harbors dreams of becoming a famous artist. The opening line of the movie is a voiceover by Rene Ricard “everybody wants to get on the Van Gogh boat”. So then what should we make of the fact that twenty-two years later the very same Willem Dafoe stars as Van Gogh in “At Eternity’s Gate,” the latest film by Julian Schnabel? “You make things that haven’t been made in order to see the things you’ve already made” is the artist/director’s somewhat cryptic response. In person, his banter is littered with stream-of-consciousness segues: part Colonel Kurtz, part Walt Whitman mash-up. It is true that Willem Dafoe was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Actor category in 2019; however, Julian is quick to point out that he’s not “in Hollywood.” Mostly he’s in Montauk at his Stanford White house overlooking the Atlantic Ocean or at his pink palazzo in The West Village. One of his newest plate paintings depicts his son Cy as dead Christ, which - as logic would demand - then casts Julian Schnabel in the role of what…Joseph? Sometimes we forget that Jesus had two dads. There is a casual confidence in his latest undertakings, the self-assurance of a man playing to his strengths while still determined to explore. Some people might ask where does Julian Schnabel get off creating his own versions of iconic Van Gogh or Velasquez paintings? You need to look no further than his son’s namesake, Cy Twombly. When Twombly wanted a Picasso drawing to hang in his Italian villa he simply made one for himself. Seeing that , Julian painted a couple of Picassos himself ¡Basta!

BP I wrote a novella called “What We Lose in Flowers,” which is sort of loosely based on your life. After reading one passage, you texted me to say what a touching beautifully-written projection of yourself. By the same token, would you say that “At Eternity’s Gate” is a projection of you, Julian Schnabel?

JS I made a movie about Van Gogh, but it’s not just a projection of myself. In the movie, Dr Rey says to Van Gogh “you’re confusing people, you’re confusing yourself, you’re confusing yourself with your paintings.” And Van Gogh says “I am my paintings.” Well, that’s true. He is his paintings and I could say that I am my paintings. I am my movie. When I’m not around anymore that is who I am. Look at this painting I’m working on - everything that’s not in the painting doesn’t exist. It’s its own world with its own set of variables and conditions. The art stays, the artists don’t.

BP Perhaps the most significant part of any painting then is the side of the canvas where it meets the wall, because that’s the intersection of two worlds colliding.

JS The edge of the painting is one world. Everything else beyond that is of another time. The painting remains a constant. After a screening of the film, a guy got up during the Q&A and asked “What is reality?” And he was asking earnestly. He wasn’t asking about the facts versus fiction in “At Eternity’s Gate.” He was questioning the nature of existence. In fact, Willem Dafoe isn’t acting. He’s in a situation where he has to survive in the best way he can. He navigates with whatever tools he has that he can press buttons inside of himself to accurately respond in a way that will be acceptable to him. He’s not making believe. The process of making something is really all there is and in the case of moviemaking, recording it. I don’t understand people who have a job where money is their goal. And then they think “I can go on vacation now and relax before I go back to make some more money.” I don’t understand that mindset. You should read Jonas Mekas’ “In Defense of Perversity.”

BP Isn’t that the American way though?

JS It seems to be an accepted way of calculating success, yes. I found some photographs of Hemingway’s house and put a little spraypaint on top of them. So someone asks me “what did you have to say about Hemingway?” I used to think that William Carlos Williams said the truth is in things. But he didn’t say that. That was my perverted interpretation. I do believe the truth is in things. This is a photograph of an empty pool at Ernest Hemingway’s house in Cuba. That’s it.

BP A broken object is often perceived to exist in a diminished state, but you redeem these broken plates as paintings.

JS William Gaddis said “there’s a permanence of disaster here, left where we can refer to it…” The plate paintings are a way of noticing a property in the broken plates and commandeering their materiality to discover something new, to bring forth an object that didn’t exist before. Painting is called a practice because you are learning what to do with materials. The process of making a painting is different than the making of an image. An image itself is changing as it’s being painted. You have to let the horse run and just hold on to the reigns.

BP I love when you discover names for sensations that you’ve known your whole life. For instance, the pleasant smell of earth after the rain is called petrichor. Now we all know that smell, but some of us go our entire lives without learning there’s a name for it.

JS To name is to numb. What I came to know was that Van Gogh would make paintings of his own paintings. There’s more than one painting of the same fifteen sunflowers. So I thought if he can make paintings of his paintings, why can’t I? I had made a painting of Willem Dafoe as Van Gogh for the movie and because it’s a self-portrait, it should look like the actor. After I came home, I made a plate painting of Willem as Van Gogh. I felt like trying to paint a Van Gogh from life. I like to paint in the dark. Particularly if I’m painting portraits. I can see better in the dark. Color doesn’t get in the way. When I made the first plate painting “The Patients and The Doctors”, which isn’t a portrait, I painted at night with electric lights. When you paint in the daylight, it will always look better when you take the painting inside. When I took my first plate painting outside it looked bad to me like a woman who put her make-up on in a bathroom without any daylight.

BP Is it fair to say that every painting has content, but not every painting has subject matter?

JS No, all paintings have subject matter. The way his collar is painted is subject matter. The way that Blinky Palermo would sew two pieces of fabric together, that’s subject matter. People sometimes think they see a painting when they see the eyes. When I made a painting of a girl with no eyes my father said “why did you paint over her eyes?” And I said “so you would look at her chin.”

The artist and filmmaker opens up to AD about his love of surfing, placing works in the Hamptons, and his Stanford White home in Montauk

Julian Schnabel has been finding solace in surfing since he was 15. “Surfing is like painting,” the artist, auteur, and iconoclast tells Architectural Digest in a rare conversation with the press. “It’s an antigravity machine.” It’s apropos, then, that he keeps a residence in Montauk out on Long Island to be close to the Atlantic's waves. The legendary artist and filmmaker lives in one of the few remaining Stanford White homes left on the East End, a sprawling property with sweeping ocean views. It is one of White’s original Seven Sisters homes, a group of large, shingle-style cottages built for the Montauk Association Historic District by White and iconic landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.

“He’s kept it in its total original condition; even the outside paint is original. It was lovely to see that Julian has treated the home with such respect,” says Wendy Van Deusen, curator of LongHouse Reserve, a Hamptons art museum that recently honored Schnabel at its annual summer benefit on July 20. Van Deusen first met the artist at LongHouse, and has since been invited over to his Montauk home and studio, which he has preserved in its natural state. “His studio is a short walk from his house that passes through the natural landscape of Montauk—it’s beyond imagination. Everything about Julian seems outsize, and the work space is just that: a true outside space that he created,” says Van Deusen, who formerly owned two of the oldest homes in East Hampton: the 1770 House; and the Baker House, built in 1640.

Schnabel recalls strolling LongHouse’s majestic 16-acre property for the first time, with its wandering footpaths and manicured gardens, but he didn't always intend to place works there. “I’m one of those people who wouldn’t want to be part of a club who wants me as a member—like Groucho Marx. But that being said, I went out there and looked at the grounds...it was a beautiful thing,” says the artist of the Reserve, which counts sculptures by Willem de Kooning, Yoko Ono, Dale Chihuly, and Sol LeWitt, as well as other striking large-scale works, among its offerings. Now, two of his large plaster sculptures with steel armature, Gradiva (1989) and Balzac (1982), rest near Yoko Ono's all-white oversized chessboard and the property's lily pond, respectively. “I think they define the space and look bold and solid, modern and ancient at the same time,” VanDeusen says.

As for Schnabel’s summer plans, the 67-year-old is still surfing out on Montauk and in Mexico, where he also has a home. He mentions with an air of excitement that Michael Oblowitz’s surf documentary Heavy Water will debut at East Hampton’s Guild Hall on July 25, and that he will give the introduction. “The movie’s the best surf film I’ve ever seen,” says Schnabel. “It’s really, really good. It’s definitely not a bunch of testosterone guys patting each other on the back.” The artist is no stranger to the film world: He's written and directed a handful films, including Basquiat, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and, recently, At Eternity’s Gate, about the life of Vincent van Gogh.

Heavy Water chronicles the career of surfer Nathan Fletcher, son of legendary surfer Herbie Fletcher, whom Schnabel has surfed with since he was 16 years old. In the film, Nathan Fletcher jumps out of a helicopter and takes on the waves on Hawaii’s North Shore. “This is not a travelogue. This is a life and death kind of thing. People die,” says Schnabel. “[The film] has a lot to do with redemption, camaraderie, family love, and talent.” An exhibition on the Fletcher family's adoration of the sport will open at Gagosian in New York on July 25, concurrent with the publication of Fletcher: A Lifetime in Surf by Rizzoli, which traces the surfing counterculture from 1950's to today, and features anecdotes by Schnabel.

Despite his reluctancy to speak with the press about his work ("Anybody who wants to look at my work should just go look at it wherever they can find it. I don’t really need to explain it to anyone"), it's clear that Schnabel is loved. His art-world reputation for being complicated, perhaps even a curmudgeon, belies a tenderness in the polymath. When Laurie Anderson, an avant-garde performance artist and a close friend of Schnabel's, introduced the artist at LongHouse, she said, "When I think of Julian, I think of... how immensely capable he is of love."