
©2014 JULIAN SCHNABEL/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/COURTESY ROBERT MCKEEVER/COURTESY GAGOSIAN GALLERY.
The incorporation of words in paintings is one of Cy Twombly’s favorite devices, and it may be that Schnabel is simultaneously honoring Twombly and contesting him by suggesting that to include ideas in pictures subverts art’s visual essence.
On the other hand, the magnificent Ozymandias (1990), a huge composition of oil, resin, gesso, and leather on sailcloth, contradicts that contradiction. Here Schnabel recycles the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias, about the perishable nature of glory. Like the broken statue in the poem, the painting is all fragments, with strips of leather glued onto the surface creating a three-dimensional effect, as if we were seeing the work from above rather than head-on. The white shape dominating the surface could indeed be the “shattered visage” of Shelley’s pharaoh half-buried in the sand.
But unlike that poet’s smashed monarch, Schnabel’s rough profile, along with all the other works in this show, is an homage to ruins and remains—the raw material transformed through imagination and memory into dazzling visual images.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer 2014 issue of ARTnews on page 93.