American art megastar Julian Schnabel (born 1951) has made a metier of both painting and film, and while he is equally acclaimed for his achievements in each of these disciplines, the works have often been kept separate in the public eye. Yet Schnabel's painting has drawn on cinematic imagery for years, often connecting otherwise disparate work via this theme, and his award-winning films have drawn on art both formally and as subject matter-most famously in the 1996 hit "Basquiat." Schnabel himself resists categorization: "I make art," he says,"whether it is painting, writing, photography or making a movie." This survey of Schnabel's career to date presents the artist's painterly production, from the 1970s through to the present, juxtaposing his large-scale paintings with his numerous critically acclaimed movies-"Basquiat" (1996), "Before Night Falls" (2000), "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" (2007) and his newest film "Miral," which addresses the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The complete scripts of each of these movies are featured, punctuated with stills chosen by Schnabel. Published for the Art Gallery of Ontario's 2010 survey, "Julian Schnabel: Art and Film" is the first appraisal of how Schnabel works across media, bridging painting, writing and cinema.
Julian Schnabel was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His first solo show was at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 1976, but it was with his 1979 exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York that Schnabel first asserted his presence as a figurehead for new possibilities in painting. Retrospectives of his work have been mounted by Tate Gallery, London (1983), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1987) and Museo Nacionale Centro de Arte Reina Sophia, Madrid (2004), among many others. He made his cinematic debut in 1996 with his account of the life of Jean-Michel Basquiat, which starred Jeffrey Wright, David Bowie, Gary Oldman and Dennis Hopper. "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" earned him Best Director both at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globes, and an Academy Award nomination in this same category.

At thirty-six, Julian Schnabel was not only represented in the most important exhibitions of his time; retrospectives of his works were already being celebrated in major museums such as the Stedelijk Museum, the Tate in London, or the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He writes this book, CVJ, and gives an account of his life: how he leaves Texas in 1973 to return to his hometown of New York City, hangs out in Max's Kansas City, meets Sigmar Polke, Blinky Palermo, Ross Bleckner, and numerous other people in the scene, and even travels to Europe to study the Old Masters-experiences and observations that are both poetic and amusing to read. And at the same time it is fascinating to see the oeuvre he had produced up to that point: the Plate Paintings with their splintered surfaces, paintings in oil and wax, on velvet and tarpaulins, with "dirt" and cracks and objets trouves that project into space, drawings, and sculptures. What is striking is their influence on younger generations of artists and on the current debate on painting.