Jeffrey Deitch said to be planning Julian Schnabel retrospective at MOCA

Everything that Jeffrey Deitch says seems calculated to make a splash. And so it was the case Thursday night when the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art reportedly said that he is planning a retrospective of the work of artist Julian Schnabel to debut in about two years.

Like the rest of the art world, Deitch and Schnabel were at the Art Basel Miami fair this week, rubbing elbows and catching up with old friends and colleagues. The news about the planned Schnabel retrospective has been posted on Twitter by various sources and was re-tweeted by MOCA, which has not responded to calls today for confirmation or details.

The two art-world giants recently worked together on MOCA's exhibition devoted to Dennis Hopper that ran this past summer, on which Schnabel served as a curator.

Schnabel -- known for his outsize personality and his trademark habit of wearing pajamas in public -- has been a staple of the New York art scene since the '70s, creating a name for himself with his large-scale works that feature broken plates. His work is in the permanent collections of many major international museums, including that of MOCA.

In recent years, Schnabel has been devoting much of his time to directing movies. His biggest cinematic success to date is 2007's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for best director. His new movie, "Miral," is scheduled to be released in the U.S. in 2011.

Earlier this year, Deitch announced that MOCA will be hosting a 2011 exhibition devoted to graffiti and street artists that will run at the Geffen Contemporary.

-- David Ng

Photo: Julian Schnabel at Art Basel Miami this week. Credit: Alexander Tamargo / Getty Images for Maybach

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Comments

[elegabalus]

I must give credit, under Deitch's leadership, MOCA has consistently pushed the bounds of how low a contemporary museum can sink. Just when I'd thought they hit the bottom...

[Carol]

Wow. Just when I thought it couldn't possibly get any worse. When I saw this headline, I thought it was a #fakedeitch post. But no... it's real. WOW. I am speechless. Really.... speechless.

[art]

this is a joke? he is b artist with no life since 1988

[CapedCrusader]

Mr Deitch, you are not in New York anymore. This is also not the 1980s. We have enough of the garish 1980s art in Eli Broad's collection. Hopefully, this leaked announcement is just a "trial balloon" to get the sentiment of reaction before an official announcement is made. And if you are objective and can understand how this will be a commercial and critical disaster, you will quickly put the kibosh on it and focus on LA or "contemporary" international artists whom are overdue for a retrospective and would actually draw must-see crowds.

[boris8]

Wow. That's a cutting-edge decision if I ever heard of one. Keep those shocks coming, Jeffrey.

[Bodie Brodaus]

Whatever Eli wants...da-da-da–da-da....Eli gets....

[HR]

This is what happens when you post "Seeking Museum Director" on Craigs List and tell your new hire: "Flip through backissues of Art Forum from 1985, 1991 and 1993 and whatever sounds safe and dull, we'll move forward on it. So baaaad it's goooooood!"

Seriously.

Michael Govan must be clutching his sides in laughter at the joke that MOCA is becoming at a meteoric rate. It was tragic that a once revered institution went broke and had to be bailed out, but James Franco, "street art" / Sheperd Fairey and the next stroke of curatorial genius: Julian Schnabel?

Time to pull a fumigation tent over the place.

[Julie Cline]

I am wondering if my years of dedicated, research oriented and thoughtful art projects have either become irrelevant in this new, totally self indulgent "power player or sayer" art scene - or it's participants are so outrageously over zealous to be the "it" museum director, curator, gallerist or art advisor, etc., that they allow an artst's work and memory to be lost in a moment of flash and dash.
This is literally the case with the Dennis Hopper MOCA Retrospective in LA that was supposedly to honor Dennis's work and curated by Schnabel and organized by Deitch - I am sad that this was the best they could do with Dennis Hopper's immense body of work at the end of his days. Thrown together to fill a slot, but not to do it with a thoughtful eye, not having a coherent theme, with carefully selected works, perfect prints, and a professional presentation ranging from proper framing to exhibition hanging, and that does not do justice to the artist's talent- is a curatorial crime.

It appears that it was thrown together with little thought or care by those who say they were his friends and respected his work. I worked closely with Dennis for a few years and other artists that were part of the "LA Art Scene (1960's)" in assembling an art collection centered on this period. The collection was completed a few yers ago, and is rarely seen at a private,luxury condomnium complex in Marina del Rey. However it is a comprehensive and seminal collection that visually tells the dynamic story of that era, while distinctly honoring Dennis for his ability to chronicle this important art historic period through iconic images of LA and his artist friends from Warhol to Raushenberg to Lichenstein, etc.

The goal was to choose images that connected and visually ignited the story, whether a print or a painting, or an assemblage, celebrating the cultural moment. Works that were in harmony, whether the piece was valued at $100 or $250,000, hyped or hidden, - they had the ingredients and the momentum that drove the artists to create works with a fantastic synergy.

This is what Dennis's photographs had the ability to do - His amazing giant painted billboard of "Double Standard" and the 40" x 30" black and white portraits of the young artists, printed by a master printer out of Philadelphia with every detail over seen by Dennis are at once, spontaneous, sensitive, spectacular and brilliant photographs. These images take you to the moment of one of the great collaborations of some of the most famous artists we will know in the 20th century.

Deitch and Schnabel could have easily managed this with all the material they had available, even it they delayed the exhibition. They would have created a dynamic and thoughful presentation and a much more vibrant result. One which Dennis would have really enjoyed. Dennis was always very humble about his work, but I can't help but wonder why his good friends and "art go to guys" chose to do such a lousy job.
Unless this is "business as usual" then Schnabel is in trouble.

[LocalGal]

Oh god, this is really pathetic. Does Deitch not have a clue?!

And the people on the board?!!

MoCA is going to be like the worst museum anywhere! what a shame.

This really sucks.

[Rg]

Pathetic.

[Donald Frazell]

This is what happens when the artworld is so consumed with putting on "shows". It's showtime folks, and you dont know where the reality begins and the BS ends. Still love All That Jazz, so true on so many levels, which contempt art has none of. Single ideas with simplistic illustrations with singular ideas of putting on a kiddie show. Too damn many curtors, if it is art, throw it on the wall and it will stick. Having good ligthing is all that is truly necessary, if real art, it will shine on any colored wall, or with any distraction, the more chaos the more it will glow with a lifeforce.

This is but segments of chaotic minds presented as reality, and so needs over production. where true creative art finds order in the chaos, For it is there, our simple minds simply not able to grasp it with words, manmade symbols easily twisted into porpaganda. And so we have contempt art. PR for the Academies and their patrons decadent ways of life. Few more so than Hopper, the Madhatter, Deitz, the Cheshire cat, and Schnabel, one, if not both, of the Tweedles.

art collegia delenda est

[Ken C. Arnold]

Those of us who lived through, studied through and painted through the art world of the 1980's certainly for the most part now must have a mature view of the over weighted balloon headiness of the period. The posturing and arrogance by many of the leading art stars of the time is now from my view seen as more thrifty comedy than the presentation of fine well constructed expensive tragio-drama. Maybe it takes a bigger than bigginess to make it New York. Were these artist merely taking themselves too seriously or can people really be that self involved even to the point of destruction? Who knows? No matter what and like it or not Julian was still the leader of the pack and the major domo of his not so gilded and not too pretty age. Perhaps it is the nature of youth combined with the demand of media for the exhaulted hero. Julian wanted to be that era's Moses but ended up being merely a rank and file old testimont prophet. Julian's reductio ad absurdum philosophy of art is mostly grounded in it's overreaching elementalism than in a fundamentalism of certainty and a well defined commanding knowledge of order and reality outside of what was popular at the moment both in New York and in Europe. Yet, perhaps that can be forgiven because of his youth. All art is still mostly a product of it's surroundings than it is of the lone genius working outside of time and space. When I look back at the 80's art era or should I say mini-renaissance, Guy Davenport once used that phrase to describe the early decades of the last century in Paris and I take the liberty now to appropriate it for the 1980's NY decade, still wonder what all the gloom and doom was about, yet clearly it was there and Schnabel was the leading importer of all that Aryan angst and stroke. I do give him the benifit of the doubt only because of his strange ability to produce a robust amount of varied, timely, unique art even if he read and believed the favorable press a bit too much. I don't know if the young artist and art historians studying and working today who were either too young or not around back then see things differently maybe this upcoming show will be a must see for them do to the fact that their world view has been so overly shaped by the long wars of the present age. I hope they go in droves to learn something and make their own opinion. Maybe they will come to new view of things and a revolutionary reordering of knowledge. The darker world rank of today's clash of cultures certainly is matched by Julian's philosophical bleak tempest. Great art must lead to place beyond the ego of the artist. Shakespear did this and so did Picasso. Much of the art of that period now seems forced and undefined and counter to the vast space and ocean as well as abundant light and sunshine of the present moment here in Southern California Ken C. Arnold Santa Monica, Ca