CVJ: Nicknames of Maitre D's and Other Excerpts from Life (Inscribed by artist1988

Signed , "love julian to Daniela" artworld/fashion friend on front end page in1988 Hardcover red cloth boards with mylar dust jacket. Illustrated in color and b/w throughout. 222 pages. Near Fine tight copy. 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, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. CVJ, gives a vivid, unfiltered account of his life: how he leaves Texas in 1973 to return to his hometown of New York City, immerses himself in the downtown art world, hangs out at Max's Kansas City, legendary club for artists, musicians, and cultural provocateurs and meets Sigmar Polke, Blinky Palermo, Ross Bleckner, and other figures who defined the era. He travels to Europe to study the Old Masters, absorbing the physical weight of Velázquez, Caravaggio, and Giotto, and brings that ambition back to a New York art scene still reckoning with the legacy of Minimalism and Conceptualism. The result is a text that is at once memoir, manifesto, and artist's sketchbook, poetic, brash, and frequently very funny. CVJ is essential art history - documenting a pivotal moment in late-twentieth-century art: the explosive return of large-scale, materially ambitious painting in the early 1980s, a movement in which Schnabel was a central and polarizing figure. The book reproduces the remarkable body of work he had produced up to that point: the iconic Plate Paintings, between painting and sculpture; monumental works in oil and wax executed on velvet and tarpaulins; surfaces encrusted with "dirt," cracks, and objets trouvés that project nto the viewer's space; as well as drawings and sculptures that reveal his restless experimentation. Schnabel's insistence on physicality, scale, and the incorporation of non-traditional materials opened a path that subsequent generations of painters have followed Artists working today in expanded painting practices, treating the canvas as a site for accumulation, rupture, and sculptural intervention, owe a significant debt to the vocabulary Schnabel helped establish.…