Turning Japanese

Now in mid-career, Julian Schnabel reaches a startling Kabuki stage

PAINTING

The problem for Julian Schnabel has always been what would happen when the problems went away—when the vaulting ambition had nothing (or no one) left to push against; when the transgressions, aesthetic and otherwise, were tempered by time; when the moment he helped to muscle in (the eighties) became the paradigm, now soon to be the past. In a context of no context, would he crack like his famous crockery? No, or not yet anyway. Schnabel's show this month at the Pace Gallery speaks quietly of a departure and confidently of a passage into mid-career. All seven of the paintings are done on big, timeworn Kabuki backdrops; there are green hills and pale skies and blossoms the color of candy, all flat and still, upon which Schnabel has superimposed his strokes and blotches and images mythic and lyrical. An easy, treacly resolve spoils several of the pictures, but in the others, you feel that condensation of histories and emotions which makes his paintings work when they do, and which will continue to draw us to his shows when no one can quite remember the Schnabel stories and scandals of the last few years.

Not that such a moment has arrived. Next spring Random House will publish the Julian Schnabel story. He's written it himself, and it ain't about postmodernism. Welcome to the nineties.

The Pace Gallery. New York. (10/31-11/29)

G.M.