Understanding Self-Hate (Primary Title)
Julian Schnabel, American, born 1951 (Artist)
“I have no sentimental investment in history, and psychotherapy is a misuse of painting, but I am interested in madness or paranoia or angst—as they are emotional states that are meditations on death.” —Julian Schnabel
Now known as a prominent filmmaker (Basquiat, Before Night Falls, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), Schnabel helped define the cutting edge of American painting in the 1980s. He burst on the scene with works that incorporated a wide range of seemingly incompatible approached, mixing history and myth with pop culture and personal symbolism. His signature media included broken crockery laid onto the surface of the painting as a ground for vigorous, even violently expressive brushstrokes. Other unusual painting supports included army tarpaulins and black velvet.
Understanding Self-Hate embodies Schnabel’s outsized ambitions. Three large panels of stretched velvet form the background for the loosely painted images of overlapping heads. The face on the left bears some resemblance to the artist himself, including the prominent beak, though there is little surety about any of the identities. Instead, the heads float in an uncertain space, hovering before the lush darkness of the light-absorbing velvet. Only on the right does the paint thicken to form a more substantial but still-shifting ground. Altogether the work suggests the eternal struggle to comprehend life and death forces, combining individual self-awareness with mythic proportions.
"Julian Schnabel" Stenelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 28 January - 14 March 1982.
"Julian Schnabel", Mary Boone Gallery, NY, April 1981.
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