Master's Voice.(The Talk of the Town)(Julian Schnabel)

The painter Julian Schnabel is not an early riser, and last Monday morning he was more than usually fatigued, having returned the day before from Paris, where for the past six months he has been making a film of Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." Not long after arriving at his Brooklyn studio, at around eleven, he settled into a commodious velvet armchair, with chipped gilt paint on its arms, and fell asleep.

He was dressed in jeans and a checked work shirt that was tight around the middle, and wore a long necklace of bright beads and charms, which was made by his daughter Lola when she was seven. The dimly lit space was bustling with people--assistants, several Schnabel children, and assorted visitors, including Agnes Gund, the former president of the Museum of Modern Art--but nothing appeared to disturb the artist in his Buddha-like repose.

At eleven-thirty, Schnabel got to his feet to greet six art students, who were in town as guests of the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, a program created by Ted Arison, the founder of Carnival Cruise Lines (who died in 1999), and his wife, Lin. The students had been mustered out of the Hilton at nine-fifteen, marched through MOMA, and then taken to Brooklyn in a van for a master class with Schnabel. One of them, eighteen-year-old Cheryl Smith, had the word "Rauschenberg" written on her hand, because she had seen something of his she liked in the museum.

"Hello, I'm Julian," Schnabel said. "I work here."

He began by telling the class his areas of expertise: "I know bullfighting, surfing, painting, and art." Schnabel, whose smashed-plate paintings made him a star in the eighties and became a symbol of that decade's bombast, has acquired with the years (he's fifty-five) a tinge of self-mockery that makes his egocentrism more palatable. He showed the students two of his early paintings. They were huge and dirty-looking. "I don't want art to look expensive," he said. "I like it when it looks like junk." He told them a story, now a well-established part of his legend, about how he had bought the tarpaulins the paintings were executed upon from a truck driver in Mexico, where he was surfing. The students didn't appear to be enthralled by this tale, which caused Schnabel to redouble his efforts to charm them.

"Normally, I paint outside in Montauk," he said. "If you paint something inside, it might not look good outside, but if ...