Cracked, Smashed & Plastered: Julian Schnabel’s Blue-Plate Specials with a Twist at Mnuchin Gallery

By BRUCE HELANDER November 25, 2025

From the get-go, Julian Schnabel had the vision, bravado and creative confidence that would lead him to explore memorable facets of neo-expressionism that was brand new territory in the art world. His fame and eventual fortune were destined and perhaps inevitable as he arrived in the Big Apple from Texas (see Robert Rauschenberg) with ambition, determination and panache. Fate would have it that he would attract the attention of a young ambitious art dealer named Mary Boone, who was my classmate at the Rhode Island School of Design. While in Providence (a word meaning by chance or inevitable) at RISD, she received her BFA in sculpture in 1970 and then moved to New York. Boone studied art history at Hunter College, where she met glass artist Lynda Benglis, who introduced her to Klaus Kertess, and he hired her to work at his Bykert Gallery though she was only nineteen at the time. After Bykert closed, Boone opened her first gallery at age twenty-five on the ground floor of the famed 420 West Broadway building that also housed Leo Castelli (directly upstairs), Sonnabend and Charlie Cowles. Not surprisingly, her adventuresome spirit drew attention, and critical and financial success for her and her stable of artists was not far away. Eventually she moved across the street to an abandoned truck garage that offered industrial space to fit her ambitious vision. As both an artist and dealer, it turned out to be a valuable combination that also had assisted legendary artist/dealers like Betty Parsons decades earlier with a creative informed vision for success. Soon Boone was a rising star with burning ambition that attracted artists such as Julian Schnabel, who at the time was unknown but highly confident in his own talent and abilities.

Installation view of Julian Schnabel: Plate Paintings, 1978–2025 at Mnuchin Gallery, November 6, 2025 – January 31, 2026. © 2025 Julian Schnabel Studio. Photography by Tom Powel Imaging.

In Julian Schnabel: Plate Paintings, 1978–2025 currently on view at Mnuchin Gallery, the genesis and “ah-ha moment” of Schnabel’s most iconic works on display was the artist’s 1978 trip to Barcelona, where Schnabel first encountered Antoni Gaudí’s broken plate mosaics. When he returned to Manhattan, he promptly bought a box of used dishes from the Salvation Army and unceremoniously shattered them on the ground, later adhering the broken pieces to wooden panels. Schnabel’s debut downtown in 1979 at Mary Boone was the talk of the town.

While it may be difficult now to comprehend the magnitude of the initial momentous controversy of an image of a tomato soup can as a work of art or a taxidermied goat with a tire as expressionist sculpture, these courageous advances laid the groundwork, like the debut of the innovative plate pictures, which rattled the art world. Initially the reviews were mixed, not surprisingly, but the show sold out to collectors of vision. These novel bursts of raw originality provided the viewer with a revolutionary point of view as presented in this current show at Mnuchin Gallery and are instantly recognized and simply cannot be forgotten. The plate paintings became perpetually familiar brands that provided the artist with an iconic reputation, allowing Schnabel to explore with confidence dramatic unique compositions whose pictorial energy, remarkable ingenuity and influence likely will last indefinitely. His distinctive approach to a collaged ceramic surface was, and excuse the pun, a breakthrough in contemporary unconventional picture-making that permanently placed him on the map. With daring and resourcefulness, he demonstrated the same rule-breaking stamina as artists Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella and Willem de Kooning. Rauschenberg is likely the champion of disparate materials as in his “Combine Series,” which included unusual materials like bedding, cardboard, taxidermy, stamps, newspaper clippings and gold leaf. It also should be noted that Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchanp pioneered the use of found objects from newspaper scraps to Fountain, a porcelain urinal by Duchamp signed “R. Mutt.” One hundred years later, Maurizio Cattelan produced a satirical 18-karat gold toilet titled America.

Julian Schnabel, Number 6 (Van Gogh Self-Portrait Musee d'Orsay, Vincent), 2020, Oil, plates, and bondo on wood, 72 x 60 x 10 inches (182.9 x 152.4 x 25.4 cm). Private Collection, New York. Image: Tom Powel Imaging © Julian Schnabel Studio

Schnabel, also an Academy Award winning film director who, fittingly, like the broken plates, spliced together bits and pieces of footage to tell a visually sophisticated story. He joined a rare fraternity of artists who also combined their painterly acumen into ingenious moving pictures that includes David Byrne, Jean Cocteau, David Lynch, Anthony Hopkins, Andy Warhol and Vittorio Storaro, artist-cum-scientist and the most painterly of cinematographers, was responsible for the moving canvas of “Last Tango in Paris” and “Apocalypse Now.”

Julian Schnabel, CVJ, 1985, Oil, plates, and bondo on wood, 120 1/2 x 120 1/2 x 15 inches (306.1 x 306.1 x 38.1 cm). Private Collection, Courtesy Vito Schnabel Gallery. Image: Argenis Apolinario © Julian Schnabel Studio

Julian Schnabel dishes out a delightful array of idiosyncratic plate compositions from portraits to still-lifes in his current exhibition at Mnuchin Gallery in Manhattan, and his work celebrates the courageous, daring and avantgarde modes of constructing an exotic and uncommon platform of exceptional surfaces to provide abstracted narrative scenes. The works presented demonstrate a remarkable curatorial insight and unsurprisingly singular achievement that were also acquired through noteworthy loans provided by private and public institutions from around the world. This striking show demonstrates the historic development of atypical modes of picture-making, which, in this case, literally shattered the tradition of exclusively painterly surfaces first breached at the turn of the twentieth century by Picasso and Georges Braque, who famously added collage materials to traditional canvases (scandalous at the time) and opened the evolutionary door of descriptive expression. In this astonishing collection of works there is a purposeful and idiosyncratic ungainliness, which Schnabel once collectively referred to in the past as a “Bouquet of Mistakes,” a titled borrowed for my Huffington Post review of his memorable survey show at Mnuchin Gallery in 2004. My most recent review on Schnabel was a delightful show of new plate paintings at PACE Gallery in Palm Beach which was titled, “Sliding Back to Home Plate.”

Julian Schnabel, The Red Hills Near Fez (Portrait of Jacqueline), 1985, Oil, plates, and bondo on wood, 110 x 121 x 20 inches (279.4 x 307.3 x 50.8 cm). Private Collection, Courtesy Vito Schnabel Gallery.

Julian Schnabel: Plate Paintings, 1978-2025, offers a sweeping survey of the artist’s most famous and uncompromising permanent achievements displayed in arguably one of the most handsome showplaces in New York. The works are remarkably consistent in their inventive surfaces, and the intense physicality of these rocky and uneven façades all broaden the possibilities of contemporary painting. As Éric de Chassey observes, “Schnabel’s works are arenas in which painting become both image and event, a common place where the action of one becomes the shared experience of many.”  

Bruce Helander having a discussion with Julian Schnabel and Olatz López Garmendia at a New York reception (ca. 1995).

This is a show that is memorable and surely is one of the most profoundly professional gallery exhibitions of the fall season.

Julian Schnabel: Plate Paintings, 1978–2025, is on view through January 31, 2026. An illustrated catalogue authored by Aram Moshayedi accompanies the exhibition. Mnuchin Gallery is located at 45 East 78th Street in Manhattan. For more information: https://www.mnuchingallery.com/exhibitions/julian-schnabel-plate-paintings-1978-2025#tab:slideshow