We've met at a midtown Manhattan sound-mixing studio, where the director is overseeing the dubbing of Before Night Falls into Cuban Spanish for European and Latin American release. With his stolid bulk and unkempt curls and goatee, Schnabel bears a resemblance to Taurus--the astrological sign, not the car--and he shifts with distressing ease between conversations with a reporter, two sound technicians, his wife on line 1, and a friend on line 2. No wonder his gears are momentarily stripped by questions that require the long view. And no wonder he's a born filmmaker, a fact he acknowledges when he admits, "The part I don't like is the business part. That's work. But making the movie, dealing with the actors--there are some scenes where you put everyone together and it happens, and that's like painting, in a sense."
Perhaps he's a sensualist: He reveres Walt Whitman, and the lack of a roof at his Montauk studio allows him to paint with rainstorms booming down around his ears and onto the canvas. Or perhaps Schnabel's just restless. This, after all, is a man who published his autobiography at 36 ("I thought of it more as on-the-job training notes for young painters who might be going crazy. You turn to page 17 and you see that it's okay") and who cut a major-label pop album in 1995 ("It was just some songs I wrote to my wife"). His latest career turn seems the product of impatience as well: Schnabel jumped into movies after being interviewed by a Polish filmmaker planning a Basquiat project and, deciding he could direct a better film himself, bought the rights and did just that. To his credit, he recognizes the perils of apparent dilettantism. "People don't like it when you do too many things," Schnabel grumbles. "Who the hell knows? I guess it's confusing to them."
Thus speaks the testiness of the artist who dares to become as famous as his work; for all of Schnabel's success, his paintings--and, until Basquiat, his side projects--have attracted equally vocal detractors. "It was so hard for Julian to have his record listened to," says David Bowie, who played Andy Warhol in his friend's debut film and who himself knows a thing or two about artistic change-ups. "I played a couple of tracks to a friend in the music world and told him that it was a first album by this 22-year-old protege of [Velvet Underground cofounder]John Cale. My friend went ape-s--- for it and then I told him who it really was. The look of confusion and regret over his initial enthusiasm was priceless."
Such knee-jerks have been the norm for Schnabel. Brooklyn-born and raised in Brownsville, Tex., he conquered the New York scene just as money, hype, and Reagan-era confidence were coalescing, Pop Art was running dry, and the stage was set for a new gang of art stars. Hooking up with young gallery owner Mary Boone, Schnabel had his first solo show in 1979--and all the paintings were sold before it even opened. By the early '80s, with The New York Times calling him "a painter of remarkable powers," Schnabel was the most visible member of a cocky, playful generation of neo-expressionists that included Basquiat, Robert Longo, David Salle, Francesco Clemente, and Kenny Scharf. Their spiritual godfather was Warhol, and, to some, a knack for nightclubbing was all they had learned from the master. Time art critic Robert Hughes was the most notable lance in Schnabel's side, at various times calling the painter's work "bombastic," "mediocre and overblown," and "a Macy's parade of expressionist bric-a-brac."
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