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PRESTEL | MUNICH · BERLIN · LONDON · NEW YORK

JSP_intro_FIN.indd 13 18.06.10 13:28 Art brings you into the eternal present every time you see it in person. Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I’m looking for.

Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it; it is called art. A photograph that I’m attracted to allows a detail to rise of its own accord.

Julian Schnabel

RZ_JS_polaroids_rl_mh.indd 10 18.06.10 13:14 RZ_JS_polaroids_rl_mh.indd 11 18.06.10 13:14 JULIAN SCHNABEL . POLAROIDS A RECORDING OF LIFE

RZ_JS_polaroids_rl_mh.indd 12 18.06.10 13:14 Julian Schnabel has pictures in his head. The American painter and film director has been taking unique photographs over the past several years using a rare twenty by twenty-four inch Polaroid Land camera made in the 1970s. It produces Polaroids of a dramatic scale, in black-and- white, color, and sepia. They have considerable aesthetic power and an emotional aura. “These photographs happened by lucky coincidence—somebody gave me the camera to use to take a picture for an auction. … I hadn’t thought I was a photographer.” The relationship developed quickly. “I used the camera to record the scale of places and things I was making. It was able to do that.” 1 Schnabel took his first Polaroids in 2002, and in the years that followed a portfolio of more than several hundred works has evolved. Using the camera he captured an immediate picture of himself, his family and friends, his paintings and sculptures in studios and exhibitions—an unusual tableau of images of his life and work. There are charismatic portraits of Lou Reed, Plácido Domingo, Mickey Rourke, and Max von Sydow; private rooms in the Palazzo Chupi in New York, which Schnabel designed and decorated himself; his studios in Brooklyn, Montauk, and . He uses it with the experienced eye of the painter he is, with the solid, informal aspirations of a traveler snapping shots of his trip. The Polaroids are pictures for himself . “Recording,” he says, meaning registering, taking down, entering, listing, and documenting a shadow of life. They stem from the desire to hold on to what matters to him. It involves capturing the energy of the moment to keep it from disappearing, becoming fully aware of his biography, and giving structure to life. Highly personal, poetic images result. Their immediacy and warmth account for much of their magic. Some are funny and exuberant; others are sonorous in their view of artwork and where it is made. They are images of friendship, of love, of an engaged life, and of melancholy too. They record the transformaton of life into art.

THE PAINTER . THE FILM DIRECTOR We know Julian Schnabel the painter. In 1973—at a time when Minimalism and Conceptual Art banned gestural expression, pathos, memory, and history—painting returned to a quiet corner at 95 Reade Street in , hidden from the rest of the world. Schnabel countered asceticism of form and the rejection of the symbolic with the fascination of the visual, the magical power of the image, a feast for the eyes, ecstasy, and Christ on the Cross. “He seduces the brain, broken of its habits, into an extravagance of paint, material, form and figure, of allusion and cipher: a stimulant of emotions. The effort to sum up everything once again, the whole world, the whole of life, past and present, that which has been irretrievably lost: a summa, a totality in a disparate world.” 2 “I like to paint. I like to be surprised. I needed to find my own set of tools to make art that worked for me.” 3 Julian Schnabel is not only a “seminal painter”— who became famous for his plate paintings in early 1979, exhibited in New York later that year—but has proved inspirational to other 21 st -century artists around the world. His works can now be found in a number of important collections. Schnabel is not just a “a role model, who has pursued his own course in complete freedom for three decades;” 4 he has also prefigured many trends and enduringly influenced the evolution of painting of the younger generation too. 5 “I am a painter. I always paint.” Schnabel is first and foremost a painter. This is true even though he has been producing large sculptures in wood and bronze since 1982; and even though he has directed many award-winning films, winning Best Director both at the Golden Globe Awards and at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. In 1996 he wrote the screenplay and directed Basquiat , a film about his young artist-friend Jean-Michel Basquiat. Before Night Falls followed in 2000, a film based on the life of the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, played by Javier Bardem.

RZ_JS_polaroids_rl_mh.indd 13 18.06.10 13:14 In 2007, Schnabel directed The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (nominated for four Oscars), the “moving story, largely shot with a subjective camera,” 6 of French editor Jean-Dominique Bauby’s point of view, who was paralyzed with locked-in syndrome. “It’s almost as if Schnabel has actually found a way to paint with the camera, fragmenting the image with blurry double exposures, gestural swipes and blurry shutter effects.” 7 His new film, Miral , stars Freida Pinto and is scheduled for release in 2010. Julian Schnabel is “a man who has found access to all forms of expression.” 8 In an age of specialization, he is for many a “renaissance artist” whose work is a gesamtkunstwerk . The heart of his work however is painting: “The core of everything that I do comes from being a painter, and probably the reason for whatever qualities my movies have comes from a perspective as a painter—and what that means, probably, is that I can see images without making hierarchal judgements.” 9 And photography? Until now, he has used it only as an objet trouvé . Since 1973 he has integrated historical photographs into his works on paper as pictorial elements. “I think I use photographs in my drawings almost as if they were a mirror. I use them as a non-image. … They are like a blind spot.” 10 Or Schnabel enlarges them using digital printing to create enormous canvases that he overpaints in oil, such as in the portraits of Japanese women from a twentieth-century geisha advertisement ( Untitled [ Japanese Woman ], 2005); in views of Capri, Italy; and in anonymous X-rays. His portraits, whether plate paintings or sealed with resin on canvas, are not mediated by the camera’s eye but painted directly as the artist stands in front of, and looks at the living model without preparatory drawings.

THE MAGIC OF THE POLAROID Schnabel doesn’t take pictures so much as make them. He creates objects to realize his ideas, using the tools at hand to build them up and inscribe them. The artist has the image, or the belief in the eventual image, in his head. The large format Polaroid not only exaggerates scale in the most obvious sense but, by means of its crude adjustments, exaggerates its ability to transfer power to the intuitions of the trusting artist. It is uniquely primitive—more like a pinhole camera than a fine instrument (under the shroud the image is upside down, reversed and obscure); the process involves nothing short of gathering light and directing it onto paper. At times it seems to select the light it wants. If cameras are tools for their users this one fits the painter well. If cumbersome and unwieldy in his hands, it nevertheless becomes pliable and supple as an instrument in Schnabel’s mind. Intuitively, he uses it to confirm his sensitivity for objects, for his own physicality, how he stands, how he moves, what form of dialogue he has with the person opposite him. All his affection will express, conceal, or reveal its essence—all of this is palpable in the image. 11 " e objectivity of technical photographs is deceptive, as Vilém Flusser’s Für eine Philosophie der Fotogra# e ( Towards a Philosophy of Photography , 1983) reminds us. Photographs are not windows through which one may observe the symptoms of the world decoded. " ey are not directly “legible,” and their meaning is not automatically reflected on their surface. 12 Yet more than any other art form, photography “offers an immediate presence to the world,” as Roland Barthes writes in his Reflections on Photography .13 Barthes has faith in the “testimony” of photography, in 14 15 its “evidential force” to “attest that what I see has indeed existed,” but by no means in the sense of a “copy” of the real thing but rather as an “emanation of past reality : a magic .” He speaks of his “astonishment” for photography, which perhaps “reaches down in to the religious substance” out of which he is molded. For him photography has something to do with “resurrection.” 14

RZ_JS_polaroids_rl_mh.indd 14 18.06.10 13:14 AFFIRMATION OF LIFE By focusing on his own life in his Polaroids, Schnabel raises fundamental, existential questions: Who am I? Why do I live here and now? They cause us to rethink life and death not only because of the fact that certain protagonists are no longer alive, such as his father (p.67) who died in 2004 or his friend Tucker Geery (p. 109). There is a stasis, a pause in time. The photographs transmit the past, refuting its disappearance, denying and escaping death. This is a central theme of Schnabel’s oeuvre. “We are all prisoners of our body, prisoners of death and nature. Through art we can escape it,” he said in a conversation about his film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly . “For me, it was primarily about coming to terms with death.” 15 André Kertész was over eighty and coping with the loss of his beloved wife when he discovered the Polaroid as a medium. In the 1970s, he produced captivating still lifes from the window of his apartment north of Washington Square in New York. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s wonderful “instant light” too, the effort to come to terms with death is palpable. The Polaroids he took in the 1970s before leaving his Russian homeland for exile in Italy, as well as those of his new environment—landscapes, family, domestic situations—are full of melancholy and sadness, of desire for his wife and child and then of farewell to the world. “Last night I dreamt that I had died” 16 —the idea is inscribed in his photographs. “An artistic image … is a symbol of actual life as opposed to life itself,” wrote Tarkovsky. “Life contains death. An image of life, by contrast, excludes it, or else sees in it a unique potential for the affirmation of life.” 17 “It’s about consciousness”—about perception, about awareness, about the humane— that is what holds Schnabel’s works together at their most profound level. Inhabiting one’s own body; freedom to think despite all the political impotence (in the case of the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls ); the liveliness of the mind within the completely immobilized body (Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly ).

ARTIST . PROTAGONIST . VIEWER “Photographic theory can be taught in an hour, the basics in a day. But what cannot be taught is the feeling for light. … It is how light lies on the face that you as an artist must capture. Nor can one be taught to grasp the personality of the sitter. To produce an intimate likeness rather than a banal portrait, the result of mere chance, you must put yourself at one in communion with the sitter, size up his thoughts and his very character.” So wrote Nadar, one of the pioneers of photography, in 1856. 18 Schnabel’s distinctive photographs can only have been produced in this way. They are about transforming the image into a new event, moving from the intangible to the tangible and then back to the intangible, escaping the “tyranny of the visual facts” and taking pictures that point beyond the object depicted. According to photographer Minor White, the “mirror with a memory” has to be used as if “the camera is a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor.” 19 Thus what Schnabel says of his paintings may also apply to his Polaroids: “For all the materiality in my work, it’s usually used to get to someplace outside of that. It’s usually only interesting to use something so that it will lose its characteristics that we were aware of in the first place and it becomes something else. So it’s like magic.” 20

And what of the viewers of Schnabel’s Polaroids? They are neither voyeurs nor intruders: they dream their own story in these pictures, reflect on their own lives, perceive it consciously. They can take a journey and be inspired by the artist’s insights. And so the distance evaporates, and the picture reveals something about its own state; it is there for our meditation. That is what

RZ_JS_polaroids_rl_mh.indd 15 18.06.10 13:14 Schnabel wants, to transform consciousness through his images. Viewers approach the picture, and when they leave, they are someone else: “walking up to it and when you walk away, being different!” 21

THE CAMERA The twenty by twenty-four inch handmade, ’70s Polaroid camera Schnabel uses is one of only six in existence. Each one, massive and ungainly, was originally intended for studio photography, in part because they require powerful flashes as a light source. Nevertheless, and with considerable physical exertion, Schnabel manages to set up this outsized contraption in innumerable spaces and places, indoors and out. It is a strange beast in the landscape: “A complex plaything,” 22 “like a mini factory;” 23 a two-hundred-pound mechanism converting photo paper into photographs. Before opening the shutter the photographer stands, often on a small box, covered by a heavy black cloth staring into its back looking at the image, upside down.

As advanced as digital technology is today, passionate Polaroid photographers are convinced there is no medium that compares with Polaroid large-format instant film. The tonal nuances of the analog technology of its film, the broad spectrum of interim hues and shading cannot be matched by digital technology. “This is the purest form of photography, you are taking a photograph and making a print at the same moment.” 24 Every photograph is unique; there is no negative that can be used again. The uniqueness of a Polaroid is what makes it so important. It is not printed from the negative; it is the photograph. In the age of digital paintbrushes, in an era of the total manipulation of images, in which the photograph can be pure invention—as it is, say, in the work of Andreas Gursky—this immediacy, this irreversible quality that does not permit retouching is like a nostalgic relic from a past world. “No exotic darkroom manipulations!” 25 And what an event it is! Within seconds, the image appears from the box before the photographers eyes. “Instant”—a fascinating process. The motif emerges slowly from the darkness of the gray emulsion as shadows take form. This magic is always met with astonishment. Who has not waited impatiently for the image to appear, full of curiosity? Its aura derives from its material dimension, from its special surface, which only thanks to the chemical properties of the Polaroid emulsion is raised, visibly coated, smeared at the edges, with no grain, just a smooth, reflective texture, the edge of the image visible, uncut.

OVERPAINTINGS Schnabel began painting over found “images” early in his career: photobooth images (1973), reddish-brown oil paint on maps of Italy (1983, 1987), historical nautical charts mounted on canvas ( Navigation Drawings , 2006), giant enlargements printed on polyester of photographs by his surfer friend Herbie Fletcher ( Surfer Paintings , 2006). “In 1988, I took some photographs that Henri Béchard made in Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century, placed them under glass, applied spray paint, then some Demar varnish, linseed oil, burnt sienna, and dust on the glass.” 26 Seventeen years later, in 2005, he re-shot these objects, melding the two events into a new totality. The resulting images led to a series of large-scale paintings entitled Flaubert’s 16 17 Letters to his Mother . Whereas Gerhard Richter presses private snapshots into the oil paint left over from his abstract works or runs them through it, Schnabel deliberately and intuitively applies brushstrokes to his Polaroids. The painterly gestures sometimes correspond with the image, as with the floral

RZ_JS_polaroids_rl_mh.indd 16 18.06.10 13:14 motifs added in purple ink on the thicket of trees, leaves, and grass. Or they may be archetypes from Schnabel’s arsenal of metaphors, ciphers, and symbols: the blots, sprinkles, and drops; the dynamic ribbons and criss-crossing stripes; the tangle of overlapping brushstrokes, endless loops, bands flickering from the edge into the center of the image, a triple helix reaching beyond infinity.

1 Julian Schnabel, New York, February 2010. 20 Julian Schnabel, quoted in Mark Rappolt, “The Passion of 2 Petra Giloy-Hirtz, “Julian Schnabel, ‘The Landscape of our Julian Schnabel,” in Art Review , no. 25, September 2008, p. 79. Vision’: Über Julian Schnabel,” Künstler: Kritisches Lexikon der 21 Julian Schnabel, interview by Hermann Vaske, November 19, Gegenwartskunst , no. 74, 2006, p. 3. 2007. 3 Julian Schnabel, Paris, January 2007. 22 Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (note 12), p. 31. 4 Max Hollein, “The Works and Their Viewers,” in Max 23 Andy Warhol, quoted in Nadine Olonetzky, “Polaroid: Hollein (ed.), Julian Schnabel, Malerei / Paintings, 1978–2003 , Die Maschine zum Lebensgefühl,” DU , no. 727, June 2002, exhib. cat., Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main, Ostfildern pp. 40 (in particular) and 41–43. 2004, p. 41. 24 Mary Ellen Mark, quoted in Mary Panzer, “Big Artists, Big 5 Ibid, “Foreword,” p. 17. Camera: Not a Typical Polaroid,” in The Wall Street Journal , 6 Suzan Vahabzadeh in the Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 29, 2007, August 6, 2008. Edwin Land (1909–91), who founded p. 11. Polaroid Corporation in 1927 to produce light filters, 7 Artillery , March 2008, p. 27. invented a method for instant photographs and first presented 8 Ingrid Sischy, “Interview with Julian Schnabel,” in Andy the Polaroid Land camera in 1947. It developed sepia prints Warhol’s Interview , December–January 2008, p. 139. in one minute; in 1963 color film was developed, and finished 9 Ibid. photographs were produced inside the camera in fifty seconds. 10 Julian Schnabel, “Interview by Francesco Clemente,” in Julian Land invited many artists to experiment with the cameras and Schnabel, Works on Paper, 1976–1992, Matthew Marks the film, including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Gallery, New York 1992, n.p. David Hockney, and Chuck Close and famous photographers 11 I am grateful to the art photographer Heidi Specker for our such as Ansel Adams, Robert Frank, Robert Mapplethorpe, conversation at the Villa Massimo, Rome, in March 2010. and Annie Leibovitz. He received photographs in exchange. 12 Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography , trans. by At first, they were small-format black-and-white snapshots, Anthony Mathews, London 2000, pp. 14–15. followed by photographs from the legendary SX-70 model 13 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography , (1972), and finally photographs of 20 x 24 inches and even trans. by Richard Howard, New York 1981, p. 84. formats that filled an entire wall. Land’s Polaroid Corporation 14 Ibid., pp. 82, 88. went spectacularly bankrupt, and his photography collection, 15 Julian Schnabel, “Interview,” in Focus, no. 12, 2008. which with eleven thousand works is one of the most 16 Andrei A. Tarkovsky, Time within Time: The Diaries , 1970– important in the world, will be auctioned off in 2010. But 1986, trans. by Kitty Hunter Blair, quoted in Giovanni that will probably only reinforce the aura of the Polaroid as a Chiaramonte and Andrei A. Tarkovsky (eds.), Instant Light: historical document. See Jennifer Allen, “Long Exposure: The Tarkovsky Polaroids , London 2006, p. 112; see also André Death and Resurrection of Photography in a Digitized Kertész in Robert Gurbo, The Polaroids, New York 2007, n.p. World,” in Frieze Magazine , no. 129, March–April 2010; 17 Ibid., 56. Freddy Langer, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , February 18 Nadar, “Portraits for the Million,” 1856, quoted in Beaumont 13, 2010, p. 37. Newhall, The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present , 25 See Robert Adams, Why People Photograph: Selected Essays 5th edition, New York 1988, p. 66. and Reviews, New York 1994. 19 Minor White, “New Directions,” Art in America 46, no. 1, 26 Julian Schnabel, Conversation with Louise Neri, in: The 1958, pp. 52–55; quoted in Newhall, The History of Christ’s Last Day Paintings , Ausstellungskatalog, Gagosian Photography (see note 18), p. 281. Gallery, Beverly Hills, 2008, s.p.

RZ_JS_polaroids_rl_mh.indd 17 18.06.10 13:14 NOTES TO THE POLAROIDS

RZ_JS_polaroids_rl_mh.indd 18 18.06.10 13:14 PORTRAITS

Many of the works brought together here are portraits of Julian Schnabel’s family and friends, of his daughters, Lola and Stella, from his first marriage to Jacqueline Beaurang, and his twin sons, Olmo Luis and Cy Juan, with his second wife, Olatz Lopez Garmendia, who acted in his films Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly . Julian is also seen with his father, Jack Schnabel, who emigrated from Prague to New York, and Brian Kelly, who is like a brother to the artist and has worked with him for a long time. Also pictured is Rula Jebreal, the Palestinian journalist and writer from Jerusalem who collaborated with Schnabel on Miral , his latest film based on Jebreal’s 2004 novel, La strada dei fiori di Miral .

Long-standing friend Lou Reed appears again and again often in Montauk, with a silver sword. Reed is a founding member of the Velvet Underground, which was inspired by Andy Warhol, a star of America’s cultural scene with his concerts and performances, photographs and films. Schnabel designed the stage and directed Lou’s Berlin concert in St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in 2006 and made a film of the performance.

We see Schnabel arm in arm with Mickey Rourke in one of the rare overpainted Polaroids taken shortly after Rourke’s title role in The Wrestler . As Schnabel relates, “My interest in Mickey Rourke started when I saw him in Body Heat , before he had any lines, and he was mouthing the words to Bob Seger’s song, ‘I Feel Like A Number.’ Just seeing that moment you knew you were witnessing an actor you were never going to forget. There is a brooding and tormented quality about him, a particularly American quality that has been well described by Tennessee Williams” (Julian Schnabel, Interview Magazine , Dec.–Jan. issue 2008, p. 122).

Plácido Domingo comes to the studio of the Palazzo Chupi to have his portrait painted; it was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in New York to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the great tenor’s debut at the Met. Schnabel painted him in his costume for Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra and then took Polaroids. Max von Sydow, the Swedish actor, who became internationally known through Ingmar Bergman’s films and played the role of the father of the paralyzed protagonist in Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly ; is photographed with Dick Cavett, famous for the legendary interviews he conducted on his television show over a thirty-year period; Christopher Walken, an Oscar-winner who is considered “one of the most versatile actors in America,” also a dancer. Julian Schnabel built a kind of billboard for Las Vegas from many of his portraits. Adam Horovitz, one member of the Beastie Boys, the radical New York hip-hop band, sat atop one of Schnabel’s sculptures at a dizzying height and thus became part of the work of art. And then gazing into his face one ponders: How does Julian Schnabel see himself?

RZ_JS_polaroids_rl_mh.indd 19 18.06.10 13:14 PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURES

All the photographs of Julian Schnabel’s studios and homes have his paintings and sculptures, and so we get to know central works from his oeuvre if we were not already familiar with them. They include several icons of his creative life, with which the artist lives everyday, as well as new works.

Hanging in his apartment on West Eleventh Street in 2003 is a work more than nine feet high and nearly eighteen feet wide: Cortes of 1988 (oil and velvet on tarpaulin, p. 59), The Bear’s Picnic of 1987 (plaster and oil on tarpaulin, 136 x 169 in., p. 57), and on the right wall in oil and tempera on muslin: Eulalio Epiclantos after Seeing St. Jean Vianney on the Plains of the Cure d’Ars of 1986. An example of one of his portraits—in oil, enamel, and resin on canvas, in a lavish white frame: Portrait of Victor Hugo Demo (1997, p. 63)—and a 1991 work from the Los patos del Buen Retiro series—the title is written on the painting (p. 61).

In his Brooklyn studio on Bond Street, where Schnabel worked while renovating his house on West Eleventh Street from 2005 to 2009, we see a 2003 painting from the Chinese Painting series (oil and wax on tarpaulin, p. 65) and a 1989 work from the five-part Treatise on Melancholia series (plaster and oil on tarpaulin, p. 67). Also hanging there is the giant Big Girl Painting : Large Girl with No Eyes of 2001, a portrait of an American “teenage girl”: blonde, in a plain and conservative dress with a collar. It is based on a small, anonymous painting Schnabel found at a second-hand store in Houston: he painted the same girl on thirteen canvases, covering up her eyes with a powerful, quick brushstroke. In Montauk, too, one of these variations dominates the tall space with its enormous dimensions (p. 131).

The Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills showed The Christ’s Last Day Paintings (pp. 169–171) in 2008. These “X-ray paintings” are based on a collection of X-rays from 1911 (the year his father was born) that Schnabel found in an abandoned house while he was filming The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in Berck-sur-Mer in Normandy. “They looked like paintings to me,” he says. “I blew them up into these pictures that are like thirteen feet tall. … I didn’t want to interfere with them. There was so much incident in the material itself.” He calls them “a meditation on death” and included several of them in his palazzo, like reflections on life, one could say, as expressed in their titles: Fore Get Nothing and Je Ne Rien , both of 2005, oil and ink on polyester (pp. 187, 189).

In another series of X-ray paintings, ATTO II , Julian Schnabel painted over silk screens with gestural strokes, blotches, and anthropomorphic figurations. We see them in his studio in the Palazzo Chupi. The bar of the Gramercy Park Hotel is decorated with a Japanese Painting from 2005, oil and wax on polyester (p. 175).

He has been making bronze sculptures since 1982. For Schnabel, these are “toys.” The first 20 21 exhibition of his sculptures was at Pace Gallery in New York in 1990. That same year they were shown outdoors in Chantarella in the Swiss Alps, in an exhibition organized by Bruno Bischofsberger: enormous figures, first sculpted in wood and then cast in bronze, around four yards tall, such as Gradiva , Macbeth , and Golem .

RZ_JS_polaroids_rl_mh.indd 20 18.06.10 13:14 “I went to Tangier … ,” the barbed sculpture Si tacuisses from 1990 was exhibited at the Tabacalera in San Sebastian in 2007. Idiota (p. 75) was the sculptural center of the installation at the Cuartel del Carmen, near Seville, a dilapidated fourteenth-century monastery, from October 1988 to Easter 1989. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra , which Schnabel created in Montauk in 2002 (pp. 85–87), was also photographed in his Brooklyn studio in 2006.

MONTAUK

“I often work out in the weather because it affects how a painting looks. I have also left canvases outside to get moldy, to introduce mold as a material of time.” ( Conversation between Julian Schnabel and Louise Neri , Minneapolis 2008, p. 63). The artist spends summers in Montauk on Long Island, where he paints and surfs. The Polaroids show his open-air studio and the house: a “fishing cottage” built in 1882 by the architect Stanford White. Schnabel did his first surfboard sculptures here in 2001 as well as the wild-looking figures that allude to The Iliad , made from a type of cement and then painted.

CRAZY PEOPLE

The original photographs, which Schnabel found in France, were taken in the late 1800s. In those days it was difficult to find subjects who would stand still long enough, unblinking, for the required exposure. By re-photographing these tiny source images with a large-format polaroid, Schnabel has translated them into the 21st century. The pictures act as time maps for the viewer, as well as the subjects, who never would have expected to be here with us now.

PALAZZO CHUPI

The Palazzo Chupi is like a live-in sculpture. On top of his house in , a twentieth-century factory building where he has been living and working since 1987, Julian Schnabel placed a Venetian palace, a gesamtkunstwerk , “a timeless masterpiece,” perhaps “the perfect expression of Schnabel’s life” (Ingrid Sischy), in a shade of red found in murals from Pompeii and with a breathtaking view over Manhattan and the Hudson River; nine floors added to the original six-story turn-of-the century stable, not uncontroversial in the neighborhood as the antithesis of modern architecture. Mediterranean terraces as if above the river, ceilings over twenty feet high, paneled with old wood, enormous fireplaces, the walls filled with art, his own works, those of friends and other artists such as Picasso’s Femme au chapeau , sculptures, the table and bed and every detail designed by Schnabel, the pool: you dive into another world, vision, fantasy, historically and culturally rooted in Europe, just as his painting is inspired by his early journeys to Italy.

The Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan, with its long tradition as a hotel for the haute bohème, was luxuriously restored by his friend Ian Schrager and owes much of its flair to Julian Schnabel’s sensibility.

RZ_JS_polaroids_rl_mh.indd 21 18.06.10 13:14 Untitled (Montauk Studio), 2008

22 23

RZ_JS_polaroids_rl_mh.indd 22 18.06.10 13:14 UNVERKÄUFLICHE LESEPROBE

Petra Giloy-Hirtz Julian Schnabel Polaroids

Gebundenes Buch, Leinen, 208 Seiten, 26x32 104 farbige Abbildungen, 2 s/w Abbildungen ISBN: 978-3-7913-5076-9

Prestel

Erscheinungstermin: Juni 2010

Palazzo Chupi, , Manhattan, in Julian Schnabels Studio: Malerei in riesigen Formaten aus jüngster Zeit hängt ringsum an den Wänden, auf den Tischen liegen Schnabels Plakat-Entwürfe für den neuen Kinofilm „Miral“ mit Freida Pinto und Willem Dafoe. Der Boden ist bedeckt mit Fotografien.

Julian Schnabel, der Maler, Bildhauer und Filmregisseur – nun auch Fotograf? Die Polaroids, ungewöhnlich groß, aufgenommen mit einer spektakulären 20 x 24-inch Kamera aus den Siebzigern (ca. 50 x 60 cm), in Schwarz-Weiß und brillanten Farben, sind aufregend schön; manche sind übermalt. Dem Künstler scheint es eine Lust zu sein, sie zu betrachten, zu kommentieren und zu ordnen. Jetzt gehen Julian Schnabels Polaroids auf Reisen. Im NRW Forum Düsseldorf und in der Galerie Bernheimer Fine Art Photography in München werden sie zum ersten Mal überhaupt öffentlich gezeigt. Der Prestel Verlag gibt den Katalog zu diesen Ausstellungen heraus.