This oversized limited-edition book, made in close collaboration with the artist, offers the most generous opportunity to experience Schnabel’s art outside of seeing it in person.
to think big. Very big. It seemed like everybody I knew was making an opera. You’d walk down West Broadway and see other artists, always dressed in work boots and painters clothes: “How’s your opera going?” “Good, how’s yours?” Not many of us actually made operas although we called them that anyway. Julian was one of the artists at that moment who was inventing a whole new scale, his own iconography, wild imagery, and an energy that was blasting off. At that moment he wasn’t showing in a gallery and very few people had seen his work. Our paths crossed now and then but it wasn’t until about twenty-five years later, when my husband Lou Reed and I moved to the West Village across the street from Julian, that he and I became real friends. Lou and I had moved to Julian’s street in 1998 and felt lost in the looming space we’d found to live, formerly a women’s prison. Lou, who had really good design ideas, had chosen lots of unusual lamps. He asked for Julian’s advice. Julian brought over a mast that became a stair railing, Moroccan doors that formed a balcony and created a bedroom, turning the living room into a Shakespearean courtyard, and several thick sets of two-story red velvet curtains that opened onto the silent Hudson River. Living across the street from Julian has made the West Village feel like home. Now that I’ve been away for months in isolation I think about how much I love walking home at night in New York and seeing bright lights shining up in the huge rose-colored Palazzo Chupi. I r emember seeing Julian’s model of the new building made from stacked-up cardboard boxes. As the building materialized with its balconies, arcades, crenellated arches—a fanciful fairy tale—it kept its feeling of a child’s idea of a Venetian palace. The neighbors were poised to hate it until they realized it wasn’t another monster condo—the kind that were beginning to wedge their ways into the neighborhood—but was instead some kind of painting, some kind of vision, that was also a building. Now it’s a treasured landmark. Julian could look down from the balcony and wave to Lou practicing Tai Chi on our roof. “Come by and see the new paintings,” says Julian, and every time I stop by there’s something new to see. Sometimes there are enormous red drawings on the floor, sometimes new roses on fractured plates. Next time I stop by there’s an installation of van Gogh plate paintings; in some Willem Dafoe is van Gogh, and in others van Gogh is van Gogh.
Julian Schnabel in his 23rd Street studio with The Mutant King, New York, 1981. Photo by Hans Namuth. Courtesy Julian Schnabel Archive. 18
TASCHEN LIMITED EDITIONS 2020
Last Attempt at Attracting Butterflies, 1994.