Julian Schnabel Bouquet of Mistakes at PACE GALLERY

James Kalm was a young artist newly arrived in the Big Apple, to study at the Art Student’s League on the GI Bill, when he stumbled into Mary Boone’s Gallery in SoHo for the first time. The exhibition was a revelation, and the indelible impression the works left have resonated ever since. The artist was Julian Schnabel, and this show was a harbinger of what would become known as the “GoGo” Eighties. In the forty-something years since that golden age, your correspondent has tried to keep an eye on Schnabel’s production. Over that period, he’s watched as the work and its reception has waxed and waned, come into fashion and fallen out of fashion, but always, for this reporter, interesting none the less. “Bouquet of Mistakes” is a term that Julian coined during a painter’s symposium in the early eighties. In many ways it expresses the spontaneous and freewheeling modality of artistic production and an acceptance of the risk of failure that was in opposition to the sterile formalism of Minimalism, and Conceptualism that had dominated the New York scene for a decade. Described as “Velvet Paintings” many of these mixed media works on fabric have also been treated with bleach, and fitted with extravagantly thick frames. A musical introduction is provided by EOM. This program was recorded October 5, 2023. #jameskalmreport #jameskalmroughcut #lorenmunk The inset video clip of the early Schnabel painting was from the Exhibition “Schema: World as Diagram“, an exhibition by Raphael Rubinstein and Heather Bause Rubinstein presented at Marlborough Gallery New York, during the summer of 2023.