Julian Schnabel: a man of every medium

He was a New York sensation with his broken-plate paintings. Never one to sit still, Julian Schnabel has since tackled autobiography, sculpture, music, hotel design and film – the latest of which will be screened at this month's Abu Dhabi Film Festival.

Julian Schnabel.

Painter, curator, decorator, sculptor, singer, photographer, film director - is there anything Julian Schnabel cannot master?

He would immodestly say no. He has proved to be a force of nature, with prodigious energy, output and ego. Three decades since the rave reviews for his first New York exhibition, his latest film, Miral, a beautiful, painterly tale of the Palestinian struggle, is about to be shown at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival.

It has been a remarkable journey for Schnabel, born in Brooklyn in 1951; the son of Jewish parents, Esta and Jack Schnabel, an émigré from Czechoslovakia, who became a meat worker. The family - Julian had an older brother and a sister - moved to Brownville, Texas. After studying art at the University of Houston, he successfully applied for a place in a study programme at New York's Whitney Museum by presenting slides of his work between two slices of bread. Houston's Contemporary Arts Museum hosted his first major solo exhibition in 1979, and he travelled to Europe, where the work of the Catalan architect, Antoni Gaudi, and the German pedagogue, Joseph Beuys, had a profound impact on his career.

Working as a cook in downtown New York, he continued to paint, and in early 1979 the dealer Mary Boone hosted a one-man show of his work. Collectors were so taken with it that a second show followed in November of that year. At that exhibition he unleashed his broken plate work - huge landscapes of paint over fractured pottery glued to vast canvasses. It proved a sensation. Charles Saatchi became a Schnabel champion. His paintings would sell for millions. He then smashed and splashed his way through the New York scene - invariably clad in silk pyjamas. His work was soon classified as "neo-expressionist" and he became a symbol of the heedless 1980s.

The - surely inevitable - critical backlash came as early as 1982, when his most trenchant, and vivid, critic, Time magazine's Robert Hughes, pronounced, "Schnabel's work is tailor-made to look important. It is all about capital letters, Life, Death, the Zeitgeist, and above all the tragic though profitable condition of being a Great Artist. It is big, and stuffed with clunky references to other Great Art, from Caravaggio to Joseph Beuys. Its imagery is callow and solemn, a Macy's parade of expressionist bric-a-brac: skulls, bullfights, crucifixes, severed heads." Mr Hughes saw the broken saucer as "the severed ear of the '80s"; while Schnabel was the "Stallone of painting", "the dealers' Pollock of the '80s - "the surrogate Moby Dick who will make the art world look deep. 'Ahoy! Hast seen the Great White Male?' "

Mr Hughes regarded this role as unplayable; yet Schnabel would say it was one he could quite comfortably fill. After all, he famously said, "I'm the closest you'll get to Picasso in this life." He may have been wounded by the attack but - at the age of 35 - impudently published his memoirs, CVJ. His reputation may have suffered, but in May 2008 his 1989 diptych The Valerio III fetched $517,000 at a Christie's auction.

Other enthusiasms consumed him, too. As a sculptor, in the late 1980s and 1990 he produced massively physical pieces of darkly patinaed bronze and aged wood. According to The New York Times's Ken Johnson, they looked as though "they have been exhumed from an ancient, long forgotten schismatic church". And in 1995 he even recorded an album, Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud, which critics praised for its charming directness, noting a lighter Leonard Cohen, a less cynical Lou Reed with a slightly less tuneful Johnny Cash.

There was said to be a cinematic theme to Schnabel's painting, and so his entering the world of celluloid should not have been a surprise. He saw an inextricable link between the two media, but all the clunky, restless braggadocio he exhibited as an artist seemed to dissolve as he took his place behind a camera. There is a simplicity, a gentleness and sensitivity in his films that is missing on his canvasses.

In 1996 he wrote and directed Basquiat, a biopic of the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. His sad, erotic film, Before Night Falls, followed in 2000. Drawing on the memoirs of the lyrical Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, it featured an extraordinary performance by Javier Bardem. Then, in 2007, came The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the autobiography of a former Elle editor, Jean-Dominique Bauby, who was stricken by a stroke and able to move nothing but one eyelid. Bauby dictated his book by blinking, and it was published days before his death in 1996. Schnabel also drew heavily on his own experience, as his 92-year-old father, suffering from prostate cancer, spent the last year of his life with his son. The film won him the best director prize at Cannes and a Golden Globe.

The following year signalled a further change in direction when he produced Lou Reed's Berlin, filming three revival performances of the artist in concert in 2006. Schnabel told an interviewer at the film's screening at the Tribeca Film Festival that seeing Reed perform after all these years "was sort of like watching [the actor] Chris Walken perform open-heart surgery on himself."

In the same year he filmed Berlin, he was commissioned by Ian Schrager to decorate New York's Gramercy Park Hotel on Lexington Avenue. He filled the public spaces with his own paintings, sculptures and furniture, summing up the effect as "rock 'n' roll baroque". In commissioning Schnabel, the edgy Schrager obviously had the artist's Palazzo Chupi in mind.

In 1987 Schnabel had rented space for a studio in a former stable on West 11th Street in New York. After his first marriage ended, he moved into a tiny space above the studio, and in 1997 bought the building. Over a period of two years, a 50,000-square-foot edifice took shape - a 17-storey, Pompeii-red tower with 180 windows, balconies fit for Romeo and Juliet, a triplex, two duplexes (one of which became his family home) and two one-floor apartments (Richard Gere bought one). Naming it Palazzo Chupi, after his wife, he was at least partly driven by the modest ordinariness of his parents' Brooklyn house. As he told Vanity Fair, "Everything was fake, except them. It was the feeling of limitations."

Inspired by Giotto's frescoed Scrovegni Chapel in Padua in the Veneto, he wanted a place where his paintings could be walls. And the walls were turquoise, mint and fuchsia with soaring, church-like ceilings that accommodated his greatest pictures, the Procession of Jean Vigo and St Sebastian. As New York Magazine put it, from his palazzo "he can look down on his father's old haunts".

And here he somehow manages to spend time with his family. His eldest son, Vito, an art dealer, observed, "There is no downside to being a Schnabel". He and his two sisters have taken their part in Manhattan society. Vito, Lola, a painter and filmmaker, and Stella, an actress and poet, are the children of his first marriage to Jacqueline Beaurang, a clothing designer. They divorced but remain friendly - she lives seven blocks away. He married, secondly, Olatz Lopez Garmendia, a Basque actress and model, whom he met in San Sebastian, where he has a house. He courted her by painting her name on a series of canvasses. They have twin sons, Cy and Olmo. He has since fallen in love with a Palestinian, Rula Jebreal, who wrote the novel and screenplay for his latest film, Miral.

Jebreal, on whom the 17-year-old Palestinian Miral is based, chronicles her life in the Dar al-Tifl orphanage, founded in Jerusalem by Hind Husseini after the events of 1948 in Palestine. Slumdog Millionaire's Frieda Pinto plays Miral; Alexander Siddig is her loving father, while Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass plays a commanding Hind.

Early screenings at the Venice and Toronto film festivals have elicited mixed reviews - of a certain flatness, fragmentation and a disappointment at its naïveté - that it fails to analyse or express the political dimensions. But Schnabel, the abiding artist, appears to have created from this seemingly intractable tragic mess a film of ineffable beauty. Vanity Fair wrote of the audience being "bombarded with frame-by-frame beauty"; of Schnabel applying "a painter's technique, working in deep hues, super-soft focus, and an intoxicating palette ... the film sometimes looks like a van Gogh in motion."

Schnabel felt he had a responsibility to take on the film: "As my mother was president of Hadassah (the Women's Zionist Organisation of America) in 1948, I figured I was a pretty good person to try to tell the story of the other side." He said that the values instilled in him by his mother were the same as those instilled in Jebreal by Hind Husseini. Again, as with much of his work, Schnabel's personal vision is firmly present and perhaps in new focus as he dedicates Miral to "All Those Who Still Believe in Peace."

* The National