As the most promoted, as well as self-promoted, and the most critically debated painter of the 1980’s, Julian Schnabel may have given the art scene of the boom decade its most representative figure.
However, neither the commerce nor the controversy would have occurred but for the prior reality of Schnabel’s own achievement, which was to have brought to maturity, while still in his twenties, two of the most original, or “bankable” styles to appear since Minimalism, both as inclusive of the heteroclite world as that notoriously exclusive art had been free of it.