Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Julian Schnabel (b. 1951) is regarded throughout the world as one of the most important artists of our time. He burst on the neo-expressionist art scene of the early 1980s with huge, arresting paintings on collaged shards of smashed plates, but is probably best known today as a successful filmmaker. His works combine oil painting and collage techniques, classical pictorial elements inspired by historical art and Neo-Expressionist features. This volume provides describes the personality of a metamorphic and unpredictable artist and his bold, somewhat confrontational style reminiscent of the energy and daring of Picasso and Pollock. From the broken-plate paintings that brought him fame, to the recent, massively scaled Big Girls series, the artist's work is set in the context of his overall sensibility, becoming part of an ongoing pictorial diary of a life.

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Publishers Weekly Review

Before he became known globally for his work as a filmmaker (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), Julian Schnabel was a painter of works sometimes as large as a movie screen. Although a book cannot replicate the experience of seeing these paintings in person, the book spreads the nearly 200 reproductions generously over its thick glossy pages, each receiving a double-page spread, captioned with just title and date. To give a sense of scale, the book occasionally interrupts a series of paintings with a photograph of the work in location. Eight short essays rush to the defense of their subject, so that his early success with collectors and in the medium of film doesn't tarnish reception of his work. Painter David Salle writes: "What set his work apart was his use of fragmented, physically demanding surface, which gave his vision of free association a kind of flickering, tentative quality that insists on the materiality of the painting." An expanded time line at the end of the book does the work of biography while the essays provide segues into the work itself: an interview with Schnabel, a meditation on experience by William Gaddis, a survey of Schnabel's monumental surfing paintings and more. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Author notes provided by Syndetics

David Moos is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. He served as Curator of Contemporary Art at Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama. In this position he organized the traveling exhibitions: Jonathan Lasker: Selective Identity, William Wegman: Fashion Photographs, and Radcliff Bailey: the Magic City.