By Julian Sancton

Illustration by Fritz Drury, left.

Julian Schnabel burst onto Andy Warhol's New York in the 1970s with a splash of color, re-injecting life into an art world sterilized by minimalism and conceptual nonsense. As an artist, he could not be bound, be it by style, by medium, or by modesty. Nor, as a man of overflowing appetites, could he be bound by tight-fitting clothes. No surface (broken plates, mattresses, cowhide, wood, even other people's paintings) was safe from his brush, or his fingers, or whatever he had at hand. But as success billowed his already healthy ego, his growing shadow soon eclipsed his work. In 1986, at the age of 35, Schnabel wrote an autobiography. In his estimation, the book implied, he had already lived a life worth telling. He had said everything he had to say. He had abandoned the struggle.

Schnabel's directorial d����but in 1995 marked the beginning of his reinvention. Film was the ultimate blank canvas. It allowed him to paint images in time, and to tell a story. With Basquiat, a biopic of the Haitian-born graffiti artist who ran in the same downtown circles and died of an overdose at 27, Schnabel stayed on familiar ground-the story he decided to tell was essentially his own. He cast his friends David Bowie and Dennis Hopper as Warhol and art dealer Bruno Bischofberger respectively, and Gary Oldman as a pajama-clad artist blatantly (and quite flatteringly) based on himself. And, for good measure, Schnabel repainted all of the works in the film, having been unable to obtain the rights to shoot the originals from Basquiat's family. His second film, 2001's Before Night Falls, based on the memoirs of Reinaldo Arenas, the exiled Cuban poet and novelist who was diagnosed with AIDS and committed suicide in New York at the age of 47, earned actor Javier Bardem an Oscar nomination and established Schnabel as a cinematic force.

This month brings the release of Schnabel's adaptation of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former editor of French Elle. The result of a stroke, he remained fully conscious in a paralyzed body, able to communicate only by blinking his left eye. The French-language film, for which Schnabel won Best Director at Cannes this year, visualizes a story told virtually from beyond the grave, capturing both the excruciating claustrophobia of being locked in, and the author's eventual, ecstatic spiritual liberation through creation and imagination. It is the triumphant final volume of Schnabel's trilogy on the transcendence of art over death. Bauby, who died at 44, ten days after the publication of his book (to astounding reviews), had dreamt of seeing his memoir turned into a movie. Schnabel painted it for him, and found his true voice in the process.