American painter, sculptor and filmmaker, Julian Schnabel (b. 1951) is a household name in Hollywood who has also been a favorite of ‘Neo-Expressionism’. He entered the field of art through his first solo exhibition in the year 1975, when painting as art was losing its shine. Schnabel is known for his overly assertive ways of self-promotion, often to the ire of art critics and admirers. His painting style is full of cheekiness, provocation and brute force of expression. Schnabel’s magnum opus “The Walk Home” remains the most important corroborator of his undisputed authority on “Modern Expressionist” art.
“The Walk Home” is a large piece, 9’3″ X 19’4″ in dimension, created between 1984 and 1985, and currently exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. This painting beautifully carries the distinctive elements of the resurrected art of painting in the form of defiant ‘abstractionism’, where artists refuse to limit their works to pure paintings on flat canvas. In reality, “The Walk Home” is an ‘abstract’ work set in various media, such as broken crockery pieces, metals such as bronze and copper, fiberglass pieces, and oil paints, on a wooden base. This work represents a mixture of mosaic, painting, and minor relief work as a revolutionary practice in an otherwise serious art of painting. In line with most ‘Modern Art’ sects, “The Walk Home” also focuses more on presentational technique than mere thematic expression.
Modern artists discard the concept of the uniqueness of the meaning of a work of art and prefer to keep it open to different sectors of admirers to interpret the meaning in their own way. The theme of Julian’s “The Walk Home” is believed to center on the fable of a king who was attacked by unknown assailants, who hid in wait, on his way home. It could be said that it indirectly symbolizes the artist’s resentment against the conventional landscape of art, where every new movement of artistic interpretation has tried to cannibalize the previous generation of him. It further reflects an artist’s bewilderment, amidst the haze of the ‘postmodernist’ art scene, as they identify their way back to where they belong. The bold color scheme and thick brushstrokes, the embodiment of gritty trapped energy and overflowing emotions over a variety of random media, add to the dramatic appeal of the rendering, classifying it as one of the masterpieces of modern creativity.
