American painter, printmaker, sculptor, and filmmaker who became an instant art-world success when he was marketed by the young New York dealer Mary Boone. He was one of a number of international painters—including David Salle (Salle, David) in the United States, Georg Baselitz (Baselitz, Georg) in Germany, and Francesco Clemente (Clemente, Francesco) in Italy—to emerge in the late 1970s whose bold expressive style was termed Neo-Expressionist.

Schnabel was known for culling imagery from a variety of sources, from both fine art and popular culture, in keeping with the emerging postmodern practice of denying authorial originality and intent through acts of appropriation. Schnabel's art in particular was characterized by its chaotic profusion of styles and sources, and he gave texture to his paintings by including such materials as velvet and broken dishes. He was a bigger-than-life figure in the thriving rock-star, art-as-investment scene and, with the marketing help of Boone, his first one-person show in New York (1979) was sold out before it even opened. He was 29 years old.

Schnabel grew up in Texas and studied at the University of Houston from 1969 to 1973. He then moved to New York, where he entered the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program until 1974. His developing aesthetic was much influenced by his subsequent travels to Europe.

He first became known for his paintings on velvet and for canvases whose painting surface was built up of shattered crockery and other found materials. This he attributed to the influence of Antoni Gaudí (Gaudí, Antoni)'s tile work in Barcelona. His large velvet paintings—meant to carry the association of cheap popular art of a type sold from the backs of vans parked on empty lots—were intended to challenge preconceptions about “good” and “bad” art. The broken crockery works were also intended as an affront to the austerity of high modernism and as a metaphor for the fragmentary nature of postmodern existence. On these two types of surface, Schnabel might mix an image appropriated from Oskar Kokoschka (Kokoschka, Oskar) or Caravaggio with a comic book figure and a pair of real antlers. His inclusion of many varieties of material culture, often in the same work of art, had its roots in the art of Robert Rauschenberg (Rauschenberg, Robert); however, unlike Rauschenberg's works, Schnabel's content offered no legible iconography. Some of Schnabel's work seemed to address mythical and religious themes.

In 1983 he began making sculpture, but he made more of an impression by directing the films Basquiat (1996), about the American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, (Basquiat, Jean-Michel) who died from a drug overdose at age 27; and Before Night Falls (2000), about the Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas (Arenas, Reinaldo). Schnabel's later films include Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and Lou Reed's Berlin (both 2007). The former, which won two Golden Globe awards—one for best director and the other for best foreign-language film—concerns an editor who suffers a stroke that leaves him almost completely paralyzed and dictates his memoirs by blinking his left eye. The film on singer-songwriter Lou Reed (Reed, Lou) is a documentary that records his live performance in 2006 of his 1973 record album Berlin.