“You can’t tell which paintings are mine, and which paintings are not? Do you know anything about art?” Mr. Schnabel, standing in the cabana parlor of the West Village mansion, asked The Observer. “That painting, that painting, all the paintings that are in that room, except for the Dan Colen over there and that Ron Gorchav. How old are you? That painting was made before you were born. That painting was made in nineteen-eighty.”

It was Monday night, and the Schnabel matriarch had cajoled her ex-husband and coop-flown children—Stella, Lola, Vito—to reconvene at the old house for a good cause. Julian was respectful enough to arrive in his pajamas. People asked him about the choice of food.

“Oh, the lamb,” Mr. Schnabel said to a woman holding a small platter with a bone-in appetizer, interrupting the conversation. “A little rare for me.”

He turned back at The Observer.

“You need to look. It’s more important what happens to you than what happens here. You don’t want to miss life while you’re reporting.”

Life, in this case, was a fund-raiser for World Bicycle Relief, a charity that purchases bikes for children in Africa. “Jacqueline is gathering her dearest friends with deep pockets …” the press release began. Life included iPhones that with a swiped credit card could facilitate donations. Life included exotic headdresses, Native American dream catchers, steak tartare and endless red and white wine. Life also included Naomi Campbell.

“House,” Ms. Campbell said when we asked her if she liked the apartment. “You mean house. It’s stunning.”

We were standing in the basement, snugly enclosed by a slim corridor that led to the kitchen. The head cook was making workhorses out of four sous-chefs and multiple assistants. There was plentiful lentil and parsley salad.

“I just graduated from culinary school,” said socialite Arden Wohl. The Observer asked if the food here passed muster.

“Are you talking about the chef?” asked designer Madeline Weinrib, who was talking with Ms. Wohl. “He’s amazing!”

Then Ms. Weinrib asked about Ms. Wohl’s boyfriend. He’s feeling under the weather. Stomach flu. It’s going around.

Stella Schnabel walked in with Ms. Wohl and had to make her way upstairs.

“I want to open the door,” Ms. Schnabel said to The Observer in the skintight scrum that was jigsawed together near the entryway. “It’s too hot in here.”

It was her 27th birthday.

In the basement it was perfectly kosher to light cigarettes and so guests did. Butts rested ignobly in discarded oyster shells.

The Observer bummed a light from a couple, Mane and Armand, both in fashion. Their smoke plumed and groped the original Warhol of Elvis Presley on a motorcycle, hanging unnoticed on the wall. They fawned over the wine and fetched The Observer another glass, which he had while smoking another cigarette with Theo Wenner, son of Rolling Stone editor Jann. They spoke of his childhood bonding with the Schnabels. 

“Where we headed?” said Peter Brant Sr., the Interview magazine owner and prolific art collector. He was speaking to Naomi Campbell. “Mr. Chow?”

The supermodel shrugged. A party sheepishly assembled by the back door. The Observer would also soon leave, to catch one of the last and vaunted LCD Soundsystem shows uptown, but before doing so, he spotted that matriarch and welcoming host, Ms. Jacqueline Schnabel. The West 11th abode has been her residence for 18 years. She stood radiant and calm, a mother abreast with her children and their father, none of whom actually claim the house as their home.

“You could adopt me as another son, and I could live upstairs,” The Observer suggested to Jacqueline Schnabel. He was half-kidding. His lease is soon to be up.

Ms. Schnabel smiled.

“Well,” she said, “there’s room now!”

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

As the Miami Beach Convention Center opened yesterday, Faye Dunaway as well as Julian Schnabel and his son Vito strolled around gazing at the discounted works of art, reported Bloomberg. Calvin Klein, for his part, offered this about the general mood: “It will be interesting to see how the attendance and sales are affected. So few people are interested in antiquities -- it’s more affordable.” 

New York Magazine's Vulture reports that on opening day, everyone was wondering when the Russians would show up with their money: "Art dealers are hoping billionaires Roman Abramovich and 'the Leonids,' co-owners of Phillips de Pury auction house, will hit town and start spending."

Meanwhile, according to BlackBook, caviar and champagne can still be found at the parties. Last night, Kelly Klein and Andre Balazs hosted a book signing at the Raleigh hotel for Ms. Klein’s new book, Horse, attended by Fabian Basabe, Allison Sarofim, Rachel Zoe, and Ivana Trump. 

At the Deitch Projects party that Jeffrey Deitch told us about a few months ago the band Gossip performed and judging from the photos on Patrick McMullan's website, it almost looks like Mr. Balazs and Ms. Zoe are dancing together. 

Audi threw a party with a performance by Grace Jones at Delano Hotel, drawing out a diverse crowd including Benicio del Toro, Kirsten Dunst, David LaChapelle and one of the Olsen, according to BlackBook. (Apparently it was not clear which Olsen it was.)

Over at the dinner hosted by Diego Marroquin, Allison Sarofim and Stuart Parr, Mr. Schnabel and Vito said hello to Terrance Koh. Also present: Mr. Abramovich's girlfriend, Russian socialite and gallery owner Dasha Zhukova, Larry Gagosian, Derek Blasberg, Lola Schnabel, and Glenn O'Brian.

According to the Miami Herald, Naomi Campbell and Lenny Kravitz turned up at David LaChapelle's exhibit titled Jesus is My Homeboy. 

“My dad will cook a ham and Oltaz will make the chickens—this year, she also made some delicious risotto. My dad doesn’t eat birds,” said Vito Schnabel by phone on Dec. 11. The budding art dealer-curator was in Miami, where he had spent a week at Art Basel Miami Beach in search of the “next young artist.” “We enjoyed some wine and then jumped in the pool,” he said. “Later, we sat by the fire.”

“We talk about all kinds of things. Art, movies, people, family, everything …. I don’t know—what do you talk about with your family?” said the young Mr. Schnabel.

“There are a lot of strong personalities in the family,” he said. His sister Stella is a poet and an actress. Lola is a painter and filmmaker. The twins, well, they’re 13—but no harm in prospecting.

“My little brother Cy loves to paint. He did a great painting of his dogs that hangs about his bed,” said Vito. “Olmo is a film nut. We’ll be watching The Deer Hunter, and he’ll be able to recite the whole cast and knows the movie backwards and forwards.”

“They also like soccer,” he said.

Julian Schnabel himself came into the world—he was born in Brooklyn in 1951—wanting to play with oil paints, according to Susan Orlean’s 1995 interview with Julian’s father, Jack Schnabel. Mr. Schnabel the elder migrated to New York from Czechoslovakia at the age of 15. He was not of the art world.

“My grandpa Jack was in the meat business, but he was very supportive of my father’s art. They had very a special relationship,” said Vito of his grandfather, who died in 2004. He said that he and his dad enjoy a similar relationship today. “We’re best friends; we travel the world looking at art and buying art. I help him and he helps me.”

Mr. Schnabel splashed onto the art scene in the early 70’s with his “plate paintings”—painting on large-scale, broken porcelain plates attached to wood paneling. He has also directed films, including the critically acclaimed Before Night Falls.

“Basically, I’m an artist. Whatever tool it is, whether it’s a camera or it’s a paintbrush, I’m kind of, I guess, expressing something and trying to find the right tool,” Mr. Schnabel told the press at a screening for the film.

Trend-forecaster Ian Schrager tapped Mr. Schnabel to handle the interior for his $200 million sprucing-up of the Gramercy Park Hotel. The hotel is now lathered in Schnabel originals: paintings, sculptures and furniture.

“I think my father taught me to not be influenced by other people,” said Stella Schnabel, who described herself as the “loner” of the family. She has had minor roles in her dad’s films—Basquiat as well as Before Night Falls.

Stella is taking acting classes and helping her father with the music for his new film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Mr. Schnabel’s oldest, Lola, has published a book of her drawings and photographs, Remember Me. She has also designed a high-end T-shirt line. Currently, she’s working on putting together her first gallery show, and she recently directed a “fashion video” featuring her friend Zac Posen’s resort line for Style.com.

And Vito has curated several well-received shows, including a retrospective of Ron Gorchov—an artist he’s credited with resurrecting—last June at P.S. 1.

The fashion-plate Schnabel sisters, who have long since outgrown being compared to the Hiltons, have dated in a certain demimonde. (Chalk up a Viggo Mortensen for Lola and a Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist, John Frusciante, for Stella.) Vito, for his part, has been photographed lately with models dripping off each shoulder.

“There is no downside to being a Schnabel,” he said.

Gee's Bend is a rural community located in Wilcox, Ala., an all but inaccessible patch of land created by a loop in the Alabama River. Prior to the Civil War, two families, the Gees and the Pettways, took advantage of the area's rich soil to grow cotton, using slave labor in the harvesting of crops.

After the war, and with emancipation, the Pettway slaves remained in Gee's Bend as tenant farmers. Though touched by world events-Gee's Bend was a beneficiary of the New Deal and a stop on Martin Luther King's 1965 march to Selma-the residents lived in relative isolation for five generations, developing their own patois, religion and music. It is with their quilt-making that the inhabitants of Gee's Bend-the women, really-have made an incomparable contribution to our common culture.

The nine quilts on display at Ameringer Yohe Fine Art, some of them created within the last few years, are typical of Gee's Bend-which is to say, not typical at all. Knowledge of established quilt traditions won't prepare you for the work's audacity. The Alabama artisans hew to no established pattern; idiosyncrasy is the standard. Maxwell Anderson, former director of the Whitney, lauds the Gee's Bend quilters for their "unexpected informality in a genre associated with prim formulas."

Loose-limbed improvisation is an integral component of the Gee's Bend quilts, as is material necessity: Poverty, in this case, is the mother of invention. The fabrics employed (corduroy, paisley, textile remnants from the 40's onwards and, most memorably, blue jeans) are determined as much by availability as by sensibility. Do we romanticize the women of Gee's Bend-and, by fiat, the notion of the inspired, untutored outsider-in claiming them as de facto aesthetes? Probably, but that's not to say romance can't be predicated on fact.

And beautiful fact it is, too. Little wonder that Ameringer Yohe, a venue dedicated largely to modernist abstraction, chose to feature the quilters of Gee's Bend. Their expansive geometric patterning, startling and subtle colors, and sophisticated sense of design are reminiscent of the work of any number of renowned abstract painters-none of whom shall be mentioned here. The reputations of those men and women would only be diminished by the comparison.

Pettway-now there's a name to take note of, particularly as it applies to quilters like Loretta (subtle, resilient), Katie Mae (talismanic, intense) and Allie (quirky, vulnerable). As for Bars variation (c. 1940-50), a magisterial parade of alternating blue and tan stripes: Who would have dared to predict that the back pocket of a pair of pants could achieve the density and emphasis of a slurred dab of oil paint? Amelia Bennett, that's who; you'll remember her as well. As for the names Ameringer and Yohe-they should be commended for a public service splendidly performed.

Gee's Bend Quilts is at Ameringer Yohe Fine Art, 20 West 57th Street, until July 22.

Huge in Tribeca

How would the paintings of Ron Gorchov, on display at a rough, raw and temporary Tribeca space operated by Julian Schnabel's son Vito, play outside of New York City? Not too well, I think. Though the "gee whiz" factor is high-Mr. Gorchov's stacked accumulations of shaped canvases can aspire to Guggenheimian proportions-the work is indicative of nothing so much as a New York subculture for whom the minutiae of painting is the governing impetus for pursuing the art form. Mr. Gorchov is, in that regard, a big-city provincial.

It's not that the pictorial issues Mr. Gorchov glances upon (surface and support, image and object-stuff like that) aren't important; they are, absolutely. The problem is that he excessively limits himself to them. Drawing inspiration from the mythos surrounding Action painting-you know: The canvas is an (urgh!) arena in which the painter wages existential battle-Mr. Gorchov then combines it with Minimalism's brutish physicality and Conceptual Art's brainy self-consciousness. The resulting artworks intimate primal truths, but deliver only arty tics writ humongous. They're molehills trying to bluster their way through as mountains.

Mr. Gorchov's signature shield-like canvases are nice to look at (particularly when you can walk around them and take note of their intricate construction), but the pictorial rationale for them is unaccounted for. A plain old rectangular canvas-what the hell's wrong with that?-would better suit Mr. Gorchov's hasty pictographs. The bowed supports do prove themselves more amenable to sculpture; the more the artist stops pretending that his canvases are paintings, the more honest the works become. Even then, the Stonehenge-like scale of something like Entrance (1975/2005) feels arbitrary, even larkish. Mr. Gorchov's loft must be huge, you think; otherwise, why would he bother? Why we should bother is a question as well.

Ron Gorchov is at Vito Schnabel, 250 Hudson Street, until June 25.