Art: Expressionist Bric-a-Brac

In a teetering market, Julian Schnabel is hyped

If one were to take a straw poll on th best-known young American artist the winner would certainly be Julian Schnabel, 30. The 1981-82 art season drenched him in publicity: not accidentally, since his main patron is Charle Saatchi, the English advertising man who also takes care of the public image of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party. The art world was diligently sown with rumors that his paintings were selling for $30,000, $50,000 or $75,000, though no one was on record as actually paying such sums for the work of the new stupor mundi, and the press showed its usual gullibility about the steep differences between publicity price, asking price and real discounted price. This classic hype was carried out, against the backdrop of a teetering art market, on a scale not seen since the promotion of Bernard Buffet in Paris at about the time Schnabel was born.

Schnabel’s work is tailor-made to look

important. It is all about capital letters

Life, Death, the Zeitgeist, and above all the tragic though profitable condition of being a Great Artist. It is big, and stuffed with clunky references to other Great Art, from Caravaggio to Joseph Beuys. Its imagery is callow and solemn, a Macy’s parade of expressionist bric-a-brac: skulls, bullfights, crucifixes, severed heads. It includes portraits of the likes of Baudelaire, Artaud, Burroughs and other connoisseurs of crisis. It serves up, by implication, the image of Schnabel himself as a young Prince of Aquitaine, albeit a Texan one, sleepless with memory and disillusion, contemplating the wrenched spare parts of history: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” In short, it is pretentious in a blustering all-American way, and through its angst one catches the glint of a beady little eye. But at least Schnabel does not lack industry: his current exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York is his eighth gallery show in six years.

There are two kinds of painting in it: straight and plate. The straight paintings—pigment on canvas—are the weaker and look like nth-generation abstract expressionism, which, in fact, they are. Their grid and curlicues come out of Matisse via Richard Diebenkorn, suffering indignities in translation: the drawing is sloppy, the color mud. There are also some steals from Robert Motherwell, in the form of maps of Europe with overpainting. Such work is homage rendered as cliché; but then Schnabel’s reputation rests more on his plate paintings, layer on layer of broken crockery combined with things like antlers and twigs and slathered in paint.

Schnabel got this idea in Barcelona from the serpentine benches of the Güel Park, which the great Catalan architect Gaudi had covered in a continuous collage of broken tile and plates. There were other precedents: Rauschenberg’s early combine paintings of the mid-’50s, and the glued-down plates and cutlery of a European artist in the ’60s, Daniel Spoerri. But when Schnabel started doing his plate paintings, they looked disturbing enough in SoHo, where memories tend not to stretch. All that crockery—how could it be a mere response to other art? The broken saucer would be the severed ear of the ’80s, spelling emotional hunger, pent-up violence, expressionist authenticity. Were this so, Schnabel would by now have set a new record for maintaining a defiant pout in the face of eulogies. But of course it is not so. The crockery is a formal device, a rhetorical way of producing the “interesting” surface that, as his straight paintings prove, he cannot sustain by conventional means. Most of the time it is turgid rocaille, nothing more. In these late days of museum culture, any viewer may exhibit certain Pavlovian responses to thick paint. It connotes sincerity, urgency and a haptic involvement with the world. In so doing, it has become a conventional sign, and Schnabel indicates how conventional it can get. His work is a kind of Pop art, based not on mass media but on coarse generalized fictions of intimacy and expressiveness.

Some of its traits seemed, at first, rather daring in their perversity, notably his way of painting over the crust of plates, as though its cracked and riven surface were nothing more than grain. But this, too, exhausts itself. It might not do so if Schnabel were a real draftsman, but his line is maundering, weak and thick. Thus the more likable Schnabels are those in which no figures contribute their freight of message-laden bathos; then, as in Untitled the chinaware achieves a sort of bombastic zest, lightened by the occasional chain or antelope horn.

It is pastiche mostly, but who minds that?

What the art world wants is a good $30,000 pasticheur. Schnabel is one answer—corny, but better than none at all—to its expectations of “genius.” Through the ’70s, ten years of typewriter art and little sticks on walls, the hunger for emotion grew. Collectors like a good wallow, which abstract expressionism once supplied, and minimalism, stern nurse, reprovingly denied them. Culture heroes these days are made, not born: the mechanisms of art dealing have spent a lot of time and money trying to find, and if necessary invent, the Pollock of the ’80s—the surrogate Moby Dick who will make the art world look deep. “Ahooy! Hast seen the Great White Male?” Such is the unplayable role Schnabel has been assigned. It is hard to watch with a straight face. Next, we shall see Pia Zadora as Antigone. —By Robert Hughes