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Description: Winter (Rose Garden that Jacqueline Built When She Was A Little Girl) diptych--oil, plates, wood, antlers and bondo on wood overall: 108 x 84 x 233/4in. (274.3 x 213.3 x 60cm.) Executed in 1982. PROVENANCE Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles Daniel Weinberg Gallery, San Francisco Sidney Janis Gallery, New York Saatchi Collection, London NOTES In April 1980, Julian Schnabel met Jacqueline Beaurang at the Leo Castelli Gallery. 'This was the beginning of my new life. She took away my self-pity, I started to work more. I painted twice as many paintings.' Schnabel and Jacqueline Beaurang got married in July of the same year. Their two daughters, Lola Montes and Stella Madrid were born in 1981 and 1983, and then three years later they had a son, Vito Maria. Around that time, Schnabel was invited by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam to have his first one-man exhibition. He also received an invitation to show at the Kunsthalle in Basel. It was at this point that Schnabel began developing his "drip grounds", which have been recognized as cosmograms roughly signifying the dissolution of all things into one another. Schnabel's ground of broken shards is inspired by the work of Jackson Pollock, but mediated by the discontinuous grounds of Rauschenberg's combines and collages, where separate entities momentarily form out of the flux of images, then break apart by ambient surges and tugs. But the significance of Schnabel's ceramic shard ground extends beyond fragmentation. Lay one of these paintings down on the ground, rather than hang it on the wall and it ceases to be a painting and becomes a sculptural representation of an archaeological site. Winter (Rose Garden That Jacqueline Built When She Was A Little Girl) most directly conveys this idea. The ground itself is an image. In this diptych, part of the painted broken shards represent a portrait of Jacqueline Beaurang and the others constitute the background of the painting. This creates a partial rivalry between the background and the figure. Depending on the distance from which one looks at the painting, at times the figure is indistinguishable from the background. The objects that are included in this work--parts of frames, a small table and antlers--force a distance that engenders a certain optical flatness as well as a sense of vibrancy.