Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait Premieres at Tribeca

Don’t you want to paint a giant picture now? Laurie Anderson asked the audience at a post Tribeca Film Festival screening Q&A following the premiere of the documentary, Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait about the artist well known for his work on outsized canvases and plate paintings. An art star for decades, Schnabel is also well known for his films, especially Basquiat, Before Night Falls, Berlin, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Each one is about the creative process, illuminating fellow artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cuban poet Reinaldo Areinas, rocker and close friend Lou Reed, and writer/editor Jean-Dominique Bauby. Despite the subtitle, A Private Portrait, director Pappi Corsicato never gets beneath the artist’s skin, but in showing his work and the man working, the film shows the breadth of a big career in progress.

Featuring interviews with Al Pacino, Jeff Koons, Willem Dafoe, Bono, Emmanuelle Seigner, Peter Brandt, Alba Clemente, Hal Willner, as well as his family, ex-wives Jacqueline and Olatz, daughters Lola and Stella, sons Vito, Cy, and Olmo, the portrait is large because Schnabel is large: in spirit and inspiration. “Look at him,” the late Ingrid Sischy once told me, “He’s a giant teddy bear.”

You see Schnabel painting outdoors in a three sided tennis court space, his gloved hands moving color over surfaces, sometimes with the kind of brush you’d use to cover the side of a house; at times he is moved aloft on a crane. Water is a big theme: the ocean and surfing. Images of Schnabel at the beach, or riding waves in Montauk abound, plus a quick glimpse of him with his surfboard that says I went to Tangier and ate dinner with Paul Bowles.

Schnabel noted that his favorite part of the movie, which he had never seen in its entirety before, was hearing what his children had to say about what it was like to grow up with an unorthodox father who doesn’t necessarily meet your friends or join in for soccer practice, who, in fact, wears a skirt. Lola told me after, “He’s a great father.”

Schnabel also favored a scene when Brazilian filmmaker Hector Babenco, who died last year, was miffed because his cook claimed Schnabel made the best risotto. Day to day life and the making of art are fluid for him, and he announced that he’d been chatting with Willem Dafoe about his plan for a film about Van Gogh, imagining Dafoe in a red beard. Will you make the film, I asked. “Yes, definitely,” Dafoe laughed, “If it can happen.”

Regina Weinreich

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