Donatien Grau: a compagnon de route

Julian Schnabel: Nine Works at Château La Coste opened in the Galerie des Anciens Chais, where it runs until August 15th. The exhibition brings together nine works spanning five decades from Jack the Bellboy / A Season in Hell, made in 1975, to an Untitled Self-Portrait from 2023. Alongside the nine major works, new paintings of Mediterranean umbrella pines, conceived specifically for the Provençal landscape, are shown in the Bastide, carrying the exhibition outdoors and into dialogue with the light and terrain of Château La Coste.

The works on view move across materials: shattered ceramic plates embedded in dense impasto, velvet, sailcloth, resin, repurposed fabric. The boxing ring floor of The Edge of Victory carries sweat and blood; the sailcloth of Untitled (Sister of Ozymandias) holds the flow of time. Between the earliest mark-making and the most recent figurative work, abstraction and representation remain in permanent, productive tension—never resolved, never still.

The exhibition was selected in close dialogue between Schnabel and Donatien Grau, his longtime companion and collaborator, whose essay accompanies the show in the publication from Hatje Cantz. Donatien Grau—a philologist by training, current head of contemporary programs at the Musée du Louvre, he has also previously held the same title at the Musée d’Orsay, and author of books ranging from studies of the Roman Empire to essays on living museums—has been close to Schnabel for almost fifteen years. He approaches the role not as a conventional curator but as what he calls in French a compagnon de route: a travelling companion, someone whose reading of the work is inseparable from a long, evolving conversation with the artist himself.

In the interview that follows, conducted after the opening of the exhibition, Grau reflects on what that kind of companionship asks of a reader, on the threads that run through fifty years of Schnabel’s painting even when they temporarily vanish from view, and on why the most interesting thing about these paintings is so often not what is there, but what isn’t.

hube: You selected these nine works in close dialogue with Julian. How do you approach that kind of collaborative curatorial process? How do you balance your own reading of an artist’s work with their own sense of what matters?

Donatien Grau: My reading of an artist’s work stems from the artist themselves, and is a reading of their reading. I see it as a constant dialogue, rather than two separate approaches. The artists I write about are always figures whom I am personally related to. Julian is chief amongst them.