The Patron Saint of Paint

Remember good old-fashioned oil on canvas? Judging by the splash that Julian Schnabel, the high diver of the contemporary American art scene, has been making in Frankfurt, it's still alive and kicking in the age of multimedia installations. At least that's true of Schnabel's brand of oil painting, in which buckets of pigment are applied to vast tarpaulins, sails and boxing-ring mats. His retrospective, "Julian Schnabel Paintings 1978-2003," at the Schirn Museum until April 25, has attracted more ink than anything since Christo wrapped up the Reichstag.

Paint could hardly find a more forceful salesman. Schnabel's wide-ranging postmodern repertoire offers something for almost everybody to like, though of course he has high-level, high-volume detractors. In Frankfurt, Schnabel and his Basque wife, Olatz, a stunning former model, were feted like movie stars, with 20 TV appearances, an eight-page spread in German Vogue, and the parallel rerelease of a prizewinning Schnabel film, Before Night Falls. Gushed a headline in the tabloid Bild Zeitung: MR. BIG SWEEPS BACK IN TRIUMPH.

One of the best-known celebrity artists New York City has produced since Andy Warhol, Schnabel, now 52, shot to youthful fame in the late '70s with his signature "plate paintings," in which broken crockery is embedded on a painted canvas, then painted some more. He was hailed as a "Picasso who can do anything" (Frankfurt Modern Art Museum director Jean Christophe Ammann) and derided as the "Sylvester Stallone" of painting (TIME critic Robert Hughes). But he conquered the market with price tags of $300,000 and beyond, and captured his share of limelight as well. In the '90s, as painting took a cyclical downturn, Schnabel veered off into filmmaking, and even a one-album gig as a pop singer.

His comeback show in Frankfurt, the most comprehensive retrospective of his work since a 1988 exhibit at New York City's Whitney Museum, covers the artist's various phases — figurative neo-expressionism combined with abstract; solemnity combined with whimsy and even leering humor. The most successful of the "plate paintings" on view is a striking 1993 portrait of Olatz, which has the mercurial effect of a Cubist-style mosaic. Opposite hang blood-red abstracts painted on tarps or sailcloth, white Rothko-like spears slashing across blackened surfaces, and delicate, geisha-like figures trailing off into tendrils of action painting. The wall-sized Large Girl with No Eyes, painted in 2001 in a pseudo-Pop Art style, shows a close-up of a blond schoolgirl's face abruptly eclipsed by a blue-black swathe across her eyes. Maria de Corral, who is curating the show when it moves to Madrid in June, called it "a kind of antiportrait." What unifies the show is the sheer size of the pictures. "The dimension is an integral part of this art," says Schirn director Max Hollein, who curated the Frankfurt show. "The scale gives the pictures a tremendous physicality. It turns them into almost sculpted objects."

Some younger artists find Schnabel less than experimental, even old hat. "Schnabel has no influence on younger artists like myself," says Reynold Reynolds, 37, a New York City multimedia artist currently at the American Academy in Berlin. "He's holding on to a tradition that's just not all that relevant. I would say it's like John Grisham. Extremely popular, but is John Grisham influencing serious young authors? I don't think so."

Such dissent fails to dampen the ardor of Schnabel's devotees, or the artist himself. At an opening-night gala, Schnabel complained that "there are so few people interested in art that it's our responsibility to talk it up." He protested that "painting is not Internet friendly. But painting will hold together long after your computers are broken, because of its soul." And he announced, "This is a jungle painting," standing in front of Apathy, an immense 8-m by 6-m work showing a skeletal centaur-like figure leaping across a grease-streaked backdrop. "I was in the Mexican jungle in 1986 and I came across a truck with this big tarp on it and I offered the driver $70 for it — that's what I had in my pocket — and we took it off the truck and we strung it up between two tall bamboo trees and held it taut with the help of two smaller palm trees and that's how I painted it in the jungle ? " Later he added, "I always tell young painters, 'Paint outside! If it's cold, wear a coat!'" What the crowds loved most was a quality in his booming voice that has largely disappeared in the rush to cool postmodernism — passion, swaggering passion. They lapped it up like wine from a broken crock.