The paint that cracks: When art decided to be ugly

Why had these artists, then at the start of their careers, chosen to paint badly? Why had they preferred ugliness to beauty, disorder to harmony, imperfection to technical mastery? The answer may lie in the spirit of the times: New York in the late 1970s was a city on the brink of bankruptcy, its walls covered in graffiti, where minimalist art—cold and conceptual—reigned supreme in the galleries. Bad Painting was not just a style—it was a rebellion. A way of telling the art world: "Your rules are boring. We’re going to paint like children, like madmen, like amateurs. And you’re going to like it."

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Julian Schnabel’s broken plates: when painting becomes a scar

Picture a studio in Tribeca, 1980. The walls are covered in massive canvases, some stretching three meters high. Julian Schnabel, shirtless, hair wild, works like a man possessed. He doesn’t paint—he assaults the canvas. With brushes as wide as brooms, he slathers on thick, almost sculptural paint over wooden panels where he has glued broken plates. These plate paintings, as he calls them, are both paintings and objects. The ceramic shards, sometimes still bearing floral patterns or traces of food, protrude from the surface like shrapnel. "I wanted the painting to have a physical presence, to hit you in the gut," he would later say.

Schnabel didn’t come from the art world. Before becoming a star, he had been a taxi driver, a cook, even an ice cream vendor. His approach to painting was that of an outsider: he didn’t seek to master technique but to violate it. His canvases were battlefields where religious, mythological, and autobiographical references collided. In The Patients and the Doctors (1978), grotesque, almost monstrous figures seem to float in an undefined space. The colors are earthy, the outlines blurred, as if the image were dissolving. "I paint as if I were sculpting," he explains. And indeed, his works have a nearly tactile presence—you want to touch the broken plates, to feel the roughness of the paint beneath your fingers.

For Schnabel, ugliness wasn’t an accident—it was a weapon. "Beauty is boring," he once told a journalist. "What matters is raw emotion." His canvases, often compared to Byzantine frescoes or ancient mosaics, were in reality monstrous hybrids: a mix of primitivism, kitsch, and tragic grandeur. "I want my paintings to look like they were made by a brilliant madman," he admitted. And that’s exactly what they were.

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David Salle and the art of pornographic collage: when painting becomes a puzzle

If Schnabel painted like a raging demigod, David Salle assembled his canvases like a film editor. In his East Village studio, the walls were covered with reproductions of classical works, pornographic magazine photos, 1950s advertisements, and hastily scribbled sketches. Salle didn’t paint from these images—he superimposed them, mixed them, destroyed them. His canvases were visual puzzles where fragments of high and low culture collided, as if a hurricane had torn through a library and a sex shop at the same time.

Gericault’s Arm (1985) is one of his most famous—and unsettling—works. On a canvas nearly two meters wide, Salle juxtaposed a reproduction of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, a female nude inspired by 1970s pornography, and a modernist chair. The elements didn’t fit together—they clashed. Géricault’s severed arm seemed to float in space, detached from its historical context. The female nude, painted in garish colors, looked like a bad photocopy. "I’m not trying to create harmony," Salle explained. "I want each element to retain its strangeness, its violence."

Salle didn’t just paint badly—he painted with irony. His canvases were cynical commentaries on contemporary culture, where everything was for sale, including art. "I’m a postmodern painter," he once declared. "I take images that already exist and rearrange them to create something new." But this novelty was always tinged with melancholy. In his works, figures were often cut off, truncated, as if torn from their context. "It’s like I filmed a dream and tried to reconstruct it in paint," he said. "And of course, it never works."

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The New Museum, 1978: when art decided to crack

The night of the Bad Painting opening, the New Museum was packed. Art critics, accustomed to minimalist and conceptual exhibitions, were baffled. "What the hell is this?" one murmured, eyeing a Joan Brown canvas where a woman in a red dress, painted with crude outlines, seemed to float in an undefined space. "Looks like a child’s drawing," another laughed. Yet despite the mockery, something about these works intrigued them. Perhaps it was their honesty, their lack of pretension. Or maybe it was simply that they dared to be ugly in a world where beauty had become a commodity.

Marcia Tucker, the museum’s director and the exhibition’s curator, watched the scene with a sly smile. She knew this show would cause a scandal. "Bad Painting isn’t a style," she wrote in the catalog. "It’s an attitude. A way of saying that art doesn’t need to be perfect to be powerful." Among the fourteen artists on display, some were already known (like William Wegman, famous for his dog photographs), others were unknowns (like Cady Noland, who would later become a major figure in contemporary art). But all shared the same obsession: breaking the rules.

Neil Jenney, one of the exhibited artists, took provocation even further. His canvases, titled Good Painting and Bad Painting, were parodies of conceptual art. Good Painting depicted a still life rendered in academic technique, while Bad Painting showed the same scene but with clumsy outlines and garish colors. "I wanted to show that beauty is a matter of perspective," he explained. "What’s ugly to some can be beautiful to others."

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The critics’ reaction: when art dared to be impolite

In the days following the exhibition, the critics were merciless. "An insult to intelligence," wrote Hilton Kramer in The New York Times. "A farce," added another in Artforum. "These artists paint like amateurs, and they’re proud of it," fumed a third. Yet despite the ridicule, Bad Painting didn’t disappear—it became a phenomenon.

Robert Hughes, the renowned art critic for Time magazine, was one of the few to defend the exhibition. "Finally, something new!" he wrote. "These artists have understood that art doesn’t need to be perfect to be interesting." For him, Bad Painting was a necessary reaction against minimalist and conceptual art, which had dominated New York’s art scene for over a decade. "Art has become too serious, too cold, too intellectual," he argued. "These artists remind us that painting can also be funny, moving, even a little vulgar."

Not everyone was convinced. Lucy Lippard, a feminist critic, accused David Salle of exploiting women’s bodies in his works. "His nudes are objects, not subjects," she wrote. "He uses pornography to shock, not to provoke thought." Salle, for his part, remained unmoved. "I’m not a feminist, but I’m not a misogynist either," he replied. "I’m a painter. And as a painter, I take what interests me, wherever I find it."

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The legacy of Bad Painting: when ugliness became beautiful

Today, more than forty years after the New Museum exhibition, Bad Painting is considered one of the most influential movements in contemporary art history. Without it, there might not have been Neo-Expressionism, graffiti art, or the Lowbrow Movement. Artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and even Banksy owe much to these painters who dared to be bad.

But Bad Painting’s legacy extends beyond art. It has also influenced fashion, design, and even popular culture. Vivienne Westwood’s ripped clothing, the Memphis Group’s colorful furniture, Sonic Youth’s album covers—all bear the mark of this rebellion against perfection. "Bad Painting taught us that art doesn’t need to be beautiful to be powerful," explains an art historian. "It taught us that ugliness can be a form of beauty."

Today, as contemporary art is increasingly dominated by digital installations and conceptual performances, Bad Painting reminds us of a simple truth: painting, even bad painting, can still move us, shock us, and make us think. "Art isn’t about technique," Julian Schnabel once said. "It’s about heart." And perhaps that’s the greatest lesson of Bad Painting: no matter how badly you paint, as long as you do it with passion, your art will have a soul.

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Epilogue: when a work chooses you

In 2023, New York’s MoMA organized a retrospective of Julian Schnabel’s work. Among the exhibited pieces, The Sea (1981), one of his most famous plate paintings, drew crowds. The massive canvas depicted a stormy sea, rendered in earthy tones with ceramic shards jutting out like broken waves. "It’s as if the painting was attacked by a hurricane," a visitor murmured, studying the plates glued to the surface.

Schnabel, attending the opening, smiled at the comment. "Exactly," he said. "Painting should look like it survived something." Later, as he watched visitors file past his works, he added, "You know, it wasn’t me who chose to paint this way. The painting chose me."

And perhaps that’s the secret of Bad Painting: it’s not about talent, but destiny. No matter how badly you paint, as long as you do it with sincerity, your art will always find its audience. "Beauty is subjective," David Salle once said. "But truth never lies."