Julian Schnabel is agitated. The artist and director has just walked into his new exhibition at the Pace gallery in Manhattan and is fixated on the folding table I’m standing behind. “What’s that?” he asks the PR person. “It’s … a table,” she replies. “I thought you could sit at it for the interview?” Schnabel looks appalled at the very idea. The table, he explains, is blocking the paintings. It’s upset the equilibrium of the room. It needs to be moved immediately.
Schnabel – who shot to fame with his smashed plate paintings in the early 80s then found success as a director with films such as Basquiat, Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, does this sort of thing a lot. The Brooklyn-born 71-year-old is constantly rearranging the environment around him, making sure it is just so. Ingrid Sischy, a friend of his, once wrote in Vanity Fair about how they’d shared a hotel room in Florence. By the time she’d checked in he’d moved the furniture and taken down the hotel art, replacing it with drawings that Cy Twombly had given him the day before; he’d scotch-taped them to the walls. The staff were horrified. “He wasn’t being cute,” Sischy wrote. “It was just something he needed to do.” And, indeed, it does seem to be some sort of compulsion; the man is a director even when he’s not on a film set.
