Arty Farty Friday ~ Julian Schnabel

Although the name did ring a distant bell in my head, I really knew nothing about artist and film maker Julian Schnabel before beginning this post. Schnabel's heyday seems to have been during the 1980s. As well as for his artwork, he's known for the films he has directed: Before Night Falls, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the latter was nominated for four Academy Awards. Schnabel insists he is a painter first and foremost though. His artwork includes a series of "plate paintings", large-scale and set on broken ceramic plates. "Painting is like breathing to me. It’s what I do all the time. Every day I make art, whether it is painting, writing or making a movie". See Wikipedia.

Schnabel's signature works contain an underlying edge of brutality, while remaining suffused with compositional energy. Schnabel claims that he's aiming at an emotional state, a state that people can literally walk into and be engulfed.

A reputation for making brash pronouncements about his importance to the art world - I'm the closest thing to Picasso that you'll see in this fucking life - engendered contempt from both colleagues and the viewing public.

It isn't possible, from posting small images here to get a proper idea of Schnabel's paintings, which are all quite huge. This page at Arts Observer shows a few of his paintings in slightly bigger format than I can; and see the artist's own website. Alternatively, Google Image shows many examples, with access to enlargements.

In 1987 Kristine McKenna, in the LA times article - Julian Schnabel - Artist as Bad Boy began:

Around 1980 the art world became much more corporate and big-business tactics began to be used, and Julian was blamed for a lot of that. But he really did open things up for other artists. "

.......The only thing everyone agrees on when it comes to Julian Schnabel is that it's essential to have an opinion about him. An audacious young painter who skyrocketed to stardom in the early '80s, Schnabel reintroduced the grand, romantic gesture to an art world starving on a diet of '70s Minimalism, and grateful collectors ravenous for high drama feasted at his table. The fact that Schnabel was a flamboyant bon vivant who carried himself more like a pop star than a painter made him an attractive piece of work to the press, which anointed him as the first certifiable art star of the decade.

An outspoken man of provocative opinions, Schnabel titillated the press with his stormy relationships, and his feuds--with dealers Mary Boone and Leo Castelli, and artists Robert Longo, Eric Fischl and David Salle, among others--are well documented. Schnabel resisted, for example, being included in a 1985 Calendar article on young New York artists because, he said, he didn't want to be "corralled with the other jerks."

And ended:

However, for every critical dissection of Schnabel's work, there are reams of outraged prose attacking his personal style. In wading through the volumes that have been written about him, one is struck by the fact that people object to Schnabel not so much for his work but because he somehow violates the mysterious code of behavior that governs the art world. Dozens of lesser artists are allowed to crank out mediocre product in peace, but when it comes to Schnabel, the umpire invariably cries "Foul!"

Ingrid Sischy 's piece in a 2008 issue of Vanity Fair, The Artist in Residence tells of Schnabel's
home, Palazzo Chupi:

...a Pompeii-red palazzo, atop an early-20th-century factory building on the western edge of Greenwich Village. ............
The artist Julian Schnabel is famous—too famous—for possessing such a big ego that he thinks he can do anything....... a stop-you-in-your-tracks work of architecture he’s just now finishing up in Greenwich Village. Plunked smack on top of the early-20th-century factory building where the artist has long lived and worked on far West 11th Street is a Pompeii-red palazzo, stuccoed on the outside, with five huge residences, plus a studio for Schnabel, some serious exhibition space, and a swimming pool fit for Citizen Kane. The place looks as if it began life in Venice on the Grand Canal, somehow floated up the Hudson River, moored on the West Side Highway, then hoisted itself atop its three-story “pedestal.” The building even has a fanciful name, announced on its front: Palazzo Chupi, after the nickname of Schnabel’s Spanish wife, Olatz.
"I do what I want and I guess that makes some people nervous," says the 36-year-old artist during a conversation at his cavernous Manhattan studio.

Adding to the air of eccentricity Schnabel enjoys, he wears pyjamas as daywear.

ASTROLOGY

Born on 26 October 1951 in Brooklyn, New York - no time of birth is known, chart is set for noon.

 Hat-tip for photograph  HERE

I wouldn't immediately see this as the natal chart of an out-and-out eccentric - Schnabel isn't one of those anyway. True eccentrics don't know they are being eccentric, Schnabel knows exactly what he's doing when he acts in ways that are not "mainstream", even for those in his arty farty circles.

The Scorpio/Virgo mix, which makes up a large part of his personality, isn't as contrasting as one might at first suspect. The intensity and passion of Scorpio Sun/Mercury can sit fairly easily with Moon/Mars/Venus in Virgo's demands to organise, work hard, seek perfection.

The undercurrent of non-mainstream in Schnabel's nature comes, I believe, from Uranus, the planet of eccentricity in Cancer, situated in sextile to his Virgo cluster, and in trine to Mercury in Scorpio.

Jupiter, planet of excess and expansiveness, out on its own in Aries, seems to form a "handle" or "funnel" for the main grouping of his natal planets, as well as sitting in opposition to Saturn, planet of restriction and structure. Schnabel's large-scale artwork smells of Jupiter to me! The Jupiter-Saturn opposition adds a little something to that non-mainstream undercurrent already mentioned - it's a symbolic tug-of-war between opposite traits: expansiveness and restriction.