Andy Warhol spent the majority of his artistic career exploring the glamor, and glamorization of American culture. The melding of the arts and entertainment with the commercial realm was his greatest inspiration and constantly provided him with his most recognizable and powerful images. His early portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Liz Taylor are steeped in flavorful colors of the 1960’s Pop scene. Focusing his efforts on the portraits of these creative celebrities, Warhol crystalized America’s relentless fascination with fame and the famous themselves. Throughout his career, he would focus those energies predominantly on the stars of the silver screen, and yet, later in life, he turned his lens and his brush towards those characters with which he was surrounding himself, the artists who were assuming his mantle in the heady 1980’s New York art scene.

Julian Schnabel, from 1982, is a monumental tribute to the multi-disciplinary artist who has gone on to become one of the most lasting, and polarizing, figures from that era. Coming up with the other Neo-Expressionists in New York in the late 1970’s early 1980’s, Schnabel's cohort included some of the most legendary names in American post-modern art. Having his first critically acclaimed show at Mary Boone in 1979, Schnabel was also one of the first to achieve broad commercial success, kicking off the roaring excess of the New York art world in the 80’s. Warhol finds his subject, in 1982, already having had his second sold-out exhibition in 1981 jointly hosted by Mary Boone and Leo Castelli. He was the first new artist to Castelli’s program since 1971. Warhol’s own illustrious career was kick-started by the grand maestro of the New York scene and his portraiture of Schnabel exhibits both a paternalizing diminution as well as an admiration for the young artist’s ability to achieve the sort of meteoric fame that had for so long been his primary subject matter. Warhol’s camera aims down from above on the young painter, who stands robust amongst the pastoral landscape, shoulders squared, fists semi-clenched at his hips, his gaze direct into the camera. Unlike his society portraits of uniform 40 x 40 in. size, Warhol’s portrait of Schnabel stands nearly 9 feet tall, and, as opposed to those sticky-tacky colorings, here he has used only a uniform ochre hue throughout. The rawness of the image and the monumentality of the figure illustrate Warhol’s re-visitation of his earlier portrait painting style and his clear desire to impress upon the sitter, the viewer, and himself his never-ending fascination with the medium of painting.

Standing singularly impressive, Julian Schnabel is a testament to Warhol’s ability to continue to innovate and develop his own style throughout the course of his career. In its composition, its size, and its subject matter, Julian Schnabel is Warhol’s assertion of his sustained relevance and import even in light of the ascendance of these new market, and critical, darlings. Schnabel was so successful in his own art partially by reverting to an expressionist, painterly gesture, a form which Warhol, maybe more so than any other artist aside from Duchamp, had managed to undermine. And yet ultimately, it is Warhol here who literally and figuratively comes out on top – a titan among his peers and a man made as famous in his own time as those cultural and societal elites whose lives became the focus of his oeuvre for nearly three decades.