In 1984, Julian Schnabel had his first exhibition at The Pace Gallery in New York. Included in the show was Private School in California, which Roberta Smith deemed an "excellent" example of Schnabel's work, noting that the artist is, "isolating his best qualities in the velvet paintings" (R. Smith, ibid). Using velvet as a ground for his expressionistic compositions was yet another radical development for the artist who made history in the early 1980's with his startlingly innovative plate paintings. "Schnabel's introduction of different colored velvet as support was as consequential for his art as his use of broken crockery" (G. Schiff, "Julian Schnabel and his Mythology of Feeling," Julian Schnabel, New York 1984, n.p.)

The viewer experiences Private School in California with a clash of visceral, intellectual and aesthetic responses. The subject matter-- the McMartin Pre-school scandal--is nightmarish. But the rich velvet surface is beckoning, familiar, shimmeringly beautiful. Schnabel handles the paint and the difficult subject matter with dazzling expertise. "The narrative is conveyed through fragmentation: figures and fragments of figures are joined, in varying scale and without empirical interrelation, with symbolic forms in a discontinuous space" (G. Schiff, ibid). Schnabel pits the luxury and beauty of his materials against the moral poverty of his subject which addresses our belief in and reliance on a system of good and evil. Private School in California is the depiction of the ultimate betrayal of innocence; yet it is undeniably seductive in its frankness and beauty.