Portrait of a Freedom Fighter

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Portrait of a Freedom Fighter

Artist Julian Schnabel (American, born 1951)

Date1984

Dimensions71 5/8 x 60 1/4 in. (181.9 x 153 cm)

Mediumoil on panel with ceramic plate fragments and epoxy

ClassificationPaintings

Credit LineGift of Mr. and Mrs. William E. Levis and of the Woodward Foundation, by exchange

Object number

2005.292

On View

Toledo Museum of Art (2445 Monroe Street), Gallery, 02A, Wolfe

Label TextI believe that paintings are physical things that need to be seen in person… So my interest is in the battle between the pictorial and the object-ness of a painting. —Julian Schnabel View Portrait of a Freedom Fighter from a distance of several feet. Notice how clear the face is from far away. But the face seems to “dissolve” the closer you get to it and the details that make up the actual surface become more noticeable. During the late 1970s and 1980s, Julian Schnabel painted on broken crockery attached to flat structures, creating a hybrid of painting and sculpture. He relished the resulting tension between our ability to recognize the painted image and the three-dimensionality of the unconventional surface. The “freedom fighter” is Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas (1943–1990), whose homosexuality and anti-authoritarian stances led to persecution and exile from his homeland. In 2000, Schnabel directed the Oscar-nominated film Before Night Falls, which recounts the poet’s travails and his suicide after battling HIV/AIDS.Published ReferencesToledo Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art Masterworks, Toledo, 2009, p. 351, repr. (col.).