Julian Schnabel - 20th c. & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York Thursday, July 2, 2020 | Phillips

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  • In Short

    Marked by the fearless bombast that has defined much of the artist’s career, Julian Schnabel’s Lazarus, Second Painting for Aldo Moro, 1979, exemplifies the artist’s explorations of the chimeric similitude of abstraction and figuration through it energetic warping of competing forms. The present artwork is emblematic of the transformative period of experimentation Schnabel experienced at the close of the 1970s as he began incorporating wax into his paintings, a material that has had a lasting effect on his practice. Schnabel here uses palimpsests of thickly applied wax and oil paint to create striking crags and vast ravines of material on the surface of the canvas, exaggerating the topography of the painting and amplifying its physical presence.

  • Lazarus, Second Painting for Aldo Moro

    Schnabel uses palimpsests of thickly applied wax and oil paint to create striking crags and vast ravines of material on the surface of the canvas, exaggerating the topography of the painting and amplifying its physical presence. Lazarus, Second Painting for Aldo Moro, whose title references the assassinated Italian Prime Minister, strikes the viewer with the same athletic impasto and emotional gravity that distinguished the work of both Chaim Soutine and Willem de Kooning, artists with whom Schnabel feels a personal affinity and who have served as important historical precedents for the contemporary painter’s own work. 

     

    As Constance Lewallen wrote on the ocassion of the work's inclusion in the Berkeley Art Museum's Julian Schnabel exhibition in 1982,  "Always concerned with surfaces, Schnabel's works of the mid- and late seventies are characterized by a buildup of oil, wax and plaster, influenced by Johns and Brice Marden. Lazarus (Second Painting for Aldo Moro) and Born in 1951 (St. Sebastian) from this group also demonstrate Schnabel's penchant for disrupting the two-dimensional plane of his paintings, here with gouges and ridges, which are then, like the broken plates in later works, painted upon as if they were not there, daring the viewer to ignore their presence" (Constance Lewallen, Julian Schnabel / MATRIX 52, exh. brochure,  Berkeley Art Museum, May 15, 1982 - July 31, 1982,  online).

    • Provenance

      Daniel Weinberg Gallery, San Francisco
      Luhring Augustine & Hodes Gallery, New York
      Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1988

    • Exhibited

      San Francisco, Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Julian Schnabel, 1979
      Berkeley, University Art Museum, University of California, Julian Schnabel: MATRIX 52, May 15 - July 31, 1982, n.p.

Property from a Distinguished Midwestern Collection

126

Lazarus, Second Painting for Aldo Moro

signed and dated "Julian Schnabel 1979" on the reverse; further signed, titled, inscribed and dated "Julian Schnabel Spring 1979 2nd ptng for Aldo Moro (Lazarus)" on the stretcher; further signed and indistinctly inscribed "Julian Schnabel" on the overlap
oil and wax on canvas
95 5/8 x 72 in. (242.9 x 182.9 cm)
Painted in 1979.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$100,000 - 150,000 

Sold for $435,000

Contact Specialist

John McCord
Head of Day Sale, Morning Session
New York
+1 212 940 1261

20th c. & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session

New York Auction 2 July 2020