Schnabel, Julian

Schnabel, Julian (1951- ), American painter and latterly film director, whose ambitious figurative works attracted enormous attention in both the United States and Europe. He combined a distinctive pictorial style with a remarkable talent for publicity.

Schnabel was born in New York on October 26, 1951, but in 1965 moved to Brownsville, Texas. He studied at the University of Houston from 1969 to 1973, before taking part in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program for young artists in New York between 1973 and 1974. He was inspired by a variety of modern artists, including Pablo Picasso and, in particular, Jackson Pollock, whose influence can be seen in the large scale and expressionistic style of his work. Although Schnabel exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, in 1975, he did not become widely known until the late 1970s. He lives and works in New York.

Schnabel's dramatic, often brightly coloured paintings became famous for their enigmatic imagery and rough texture. In the late 1970s Schnabel began to paint over unconventional surfaces, including broken crockery, velvet, animal hide, and tarpaulin. This feature of his work was influenced in part by the role of ceramic material in the architecture of Antoni Gaudí. The crockery created a particularly vivid expressionistic effect, as can be seen in The Sea (1981, Saatchi Gallery, London). Schnabel's motifs derive from a wide range of sources, including Christianity, Classical mythology, contemporary magazines, and children's books. His preoccupation with both sex and death is particularly apparent in the Maria Callas paintings of 1982, exemplified by Maria Callas 4 (1982, Saatchi Gallery, London). While Schnabel is primarily a painter, he also began making sculpture in 1983. Schnabel is one of the most influential artists of the past 30 years. Despite criticisms of the theatricality of his work, he has played a leading role in the return to figurative painting that took place during the late 1970s and 1980s.

Latterly, Schnabel co-wrote and directed the films Basquiat (1996) and Before Night Falls (2000), and in 2007 received the Best Director award at Cannes for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a film based on a moving, autobiographical account of experiencing locked-in syndrome by the French writer Jean-Dominique Bauby. Schnabel later received the Golden Globe award for Best Director for his work on the film and a Best Director Academy Award nomination.