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Some of you already know that the NoA's Elliot Kotek is working on a book, which he hopes to finish by the end of July, involving and inspired by a selection of the works of truly great artists. From his research, Elliot shares the following excerpts from Julian Schnabel's 1987 Random House publication, CVJ - Maitre D's & Other Excerpts From Life

CVJ was published a full ten years before Schnabel's outing as an acclaimed filmmaker (Basquiat (1996), Before Night Falls (2000), The Diving Bell & The Butterfly (2007)), at a time when the young artist was both a highly praised and much maligned painter churning out huge canvases, including his most notable plate paintings. His contemporaries were Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Ross Bleckner, busy looking up to the works of Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and other pop artists, as well as Barnett Newman, Brice Marden, and many more in the contemporary mix.

Of those artists, Schnabel writes:
"In Pollock's work every element in the painting is subordinate to every other element. As you notice one part, your perception of it is immediately disrupted by its proximity to the next stroke. The relationship of the parts is such that you can't focus on just one part making their cumulative ability to disrupt each other the generating element that comprises the vision of the painting as a whole.

Robert Rauschenberg took Abstract Expressionism at its word. Accepting his notion of paint as paint he let it coexist as an object with objects of the real world. He was saying all of these things have an equal right to be in a painting and therefore have meaning.

Jasper Johns most explicitly made a painting of a given, a flag. He wasn't composing. He was selecting to present a whole flag. There wasn't a star more important than another star, the stripes weren't more important than the stars. The stars weren't more important than the wax and the newspaper that they were born of. They were all equal members of a painting of a flag.

In the same way, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein's paintings of found images have no qualitative judgments about the parts of the painting or subject matter too "banal" for a painting. The images they selected were presented intact. The images of these paintings were complete when they were selected before they were painted. Each element was a part of the predisposed selected image which covered the whole surface of the painting. In all of this work, the egality of the parts is the key. (Painting is building a seamless fiction.)"

There are other gems in the book also. Schnabel offering, on relationships, "For any artist, no matter how generous or normal they try to be, their companion will always be left out in some way. The most difficult thing to understand is that the work that is being made for the love of them is the very thing that is robbing them of the love they need from you."

Although Schnabel's fine art has somewhat receded from the public spotlight in favor of the brighter lights of the big screen, the artist-auteur remains a force of nature, delivering new works to galleries such as Larry Gagosian in Beverly Hills and exhibiting in major retrospectives such as his upcoming show at the Frank Gehry designed National Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

While the book is limited in its availability, and commands quite significant prices even in used condition, Schnabel's latest film, Miral, is in post-production and has beenacquired for distribution in 2010 by The Weinstein Co.