Julian Schnabel

Interview and Photography by Mart Engelen

Mart Engelen: I have just seen your latest ‘plate paintings’ in the Trees of Home (For Peter Beard) exhibition at your son’s gallery in St. Moritz. Please tell me more about them.

Julian Schnabel: Well, Peter Beard was a very close friend. I knew him for forty years; maybe longer. And he was my neighbour in Montauk. After I had made the fi lm ‘At Eternity’s Gate’, Peter had a stroke: he could still communicate but he couldn’t really speak the same way that he did before. Anyway, I was over at his house during the summer a year ago. We were talking in the backyard; he had seen the movie and had marked-up some pages about these trees in a book about Van Gogh. But he couldn’t fi nd the book. He was very, very frustrated that he couldn’t fi nd the book that day. And I never saw him again. He died in March this year, before the summer. He wandered off in the woods and died out there—in the woods. His wife, Nejma, later found the book with the pages folded back. And when she showed me those pages, I remembered I had been to that place. There were trees that were in the fi lm, and there were trees that I had seen and there were trees that were in those photographs. So I thought, well, I never saw him again but I am going to make a painting of those trees for him. Before the summer, I had these plate panels. I didn’t paint over all the plates the way I did with the Rose paintings. I left them open because I thought that if I painted the trees with their dark kind of silhouettes on top of that surface, they would sparkle like light, like the sunlight hitting the ground or the light that was in the sky.

ME: Was it an avenue of trees in St Rémy de Provence?

JS: Yes, exactly!

ME: So, you didn’t see Peter again. But did he eventually fi nd the book before he passed away?

JS: No, it was Nejma who found it later. And you know they live less than two miles from me in Montauk so we would see each other quite often. But it was great that she found the book and I just wanted to do this for him. You know, we loved each other. He was crazy but also very particular and extreme in his own way. But you know we never had an argument in all the years that we knew each other. It was a pleasure even when we didn’t agree about anything … read more