A monumental tour-de-force of painterly skill, Julian Schnabel’s Divan of 1979 is an exceptional, early example of the artist’s groundbreaking series of Plate Paintings. In the present work, shattered pieces of tableware became a key element of Schnabel's intricate composition. Divan is the third of only five works completed from 1978-1979, which mark the artist’s first foray into the iconic medium for which he is now heavily acclaimed. Affixed like puzzle pieces to the wooden canvas, Schnabel’s broken plates fill the pictorial space, creating an abstracted composition that is playful and dynamic, ultimately underscoring Schnabel’s creative power.
Fragments of variously patterned plates sweep magnificently across the wood support, over-painted with extraordinary skill to create an enigmatic and curious scene. Speaking to the breadth of the artist’s imagination, the present work depicts a blue, limb-less torso emerging from the uneven geography of the painting, balanced compositionally by a red couch, or divan, turned on its side. Formed by means of throwing plates at the canvas ground, a method which recalls Jackson Pollock’s energetic application of washes of paint on canvas, there is a sense of barely suppressed violence in this unabashed evidence of destruction. Yet Schnabel has shaped a work of astounding power from the porcelain remnants, resulting in a painting that is undoubtedly one of the most significant within the artist’s early oeuvre. Schnabel later recalled his aims behind the creation of the Plate paintings: “When I did the plate paintings I wanted to break the surface of the painting and I liked the dissonance between the brightness of the plates and the other parts of the picture.” (Julian Schnabel quoted in Exh. Cat., Derneburg, Schloss Derneburg, Julian Schnabel: Versions of Chuck & Other Works, 2007, p. 195)
The artist made his first Plate works in 1978, having been inspired by his extensive travels around Europe on several occasions between 1976 and 1978. Upon his visit to Barcelona, Schnabel came across Gaudí’s spectacular mosaics in Park Guell, inspiring him to experiment with broken ceramics in his own compositions. As expressed in Schnabel’s own words, “My interest, unlike Gaudi’s, was not in the patterning or the design of the glazed tiles, it was in the reflective property of white plates to disturb the picture plane. The disparity between reflectiveness of the plates and the paint were in disagreement with each other and the concept of mosaic, because they fractured its homogeneity.” (Julian Schnabel quoted in Exh. Cat., London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Julian Schnabel: Paintings, 1975-1987, 1987. p. 104)
The exposure to European masterworks throughout his travels would also provoke particular inspiration to the artist, with the work of Fra Angelico, Giotto and Caravaggio acting as key stimuli for Schnabel’s painting. Reflecting on the impact these major works of the past had on him, Schnabel declared that: “I have felt a kind of affinity and an interest in old Italian painting… There is a level of synaesthesia where all the different senses are mixed together that gives you an experience that I’m interested in finding in my own paintings.” (cited in Ibid., p. 195) This concept of ‘synaesthesia’ – a condition in which the different senses become co-mingled to intriguing effect – is brilliantly epitomized by the remarkable texture of Divan, in which the eye is almost overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of differing surface layers.
The influence of mosaic is also clearly discernible within the Plate series: Schnabel superbly re-interprets this ancient technique through the humorously innovative application of ceramic and porcelain fragments to a canvas or wood ground. Max Hollein, current director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art argues that it is the ‘shattered’ quality of works such as Divan that infuses them with such power: “The fragmentary quality of these paintings… imbues Schnabel’s paintings with an inherently enigmatic, enchanted quality… We respond to these fragments of a commonplace product with an entirely new set of expectations and immediately begin to look for the inherent historical quality, the act that preceded their final existence as shards.” (Max Hollein in ‘The Works and Their Viewers,’ in: Exh. Cat., Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Julian Schnabel – Paintings 1978-2003, 2004, pp. 39-40) A true masterpiece of the Plate series, Divan magnificently displays Schnabel’s astonishing technical virtuosity and dazzling creative power.
