Eighteen months ago, in these pages, I treated the latest paintings of Julian Schnabel to severe deprecation. In contrast to his recent work, where his ever-indulgent mark-making meets no kind of formal resistance, I invoked the memory of his classic, 1980s “plate” paintings, which notoriously integrated smashed crockery into the support.

C&M now offers a rare, and I must say welcome, opportunity to examine vintage Schnabels in depth. They remind us what made him such a novelty after the uptight, minimalist-conceptualist 1970s, lending new meaning to the phrase “bull in a china shop.” The cumulative charge of these robust works, which hold up nicely for their age, even made this sometime skeptical critic hanker for another look at the perhaps too hastily dismissed recent efforts.

That said, even a no-holds-barred “Maximalist” – as catalog essayist Robert Pincus-Witten describes Mr. Schnabel – benefits from a good editor. Both floors of the tony uptown gallery are packed with paintings. Packed is also the word for the individual works, with their trademark excess – both in quantity and type – of imagery and material. The show sparkles thanks to judicious selection and energetic variety in pace: there’s a narrative of restless curiosity and protean inventiveness when you look at the best of each period, a contrast to the nauseously self-satisfied repetition in whole batches of new works (the experience to be had at Gagosian in 2001 and PaceWildenstein in 2003).

The smashed plates retain a sense of the loutish and outlandish. In some works, such as “The Patients and the Doctors” (1978) and “Divan” (1979), the actual, rather cheap crockery retains its color and pattern, and there is a sense of it as a happening – the actual crash is occurring in real time, the viewer’s. Their decorative elan recalls Gaudi’s Parc Guell – their immediate inspiration – while the implicit theatricality reminds us of Mr. Schnabel’s long years of employment in commercial kitchens.

Works from a few years later, such as “Aborigine Painting” (1980), have lost the appropriationist emphasis of the first plate pictures, as the plates, submerged in color, sink into the wood support. Even so, they retain their “plateness,” not to mention their chutzpah. The pictures are invariably made up of separate panels, often in different support materials, which takes away from any sense of the conventional easel picture (the scale and surface would be unlikely to admit this, anyhow).

By the critical standards of the time, it was not the unconventional approach, but the act of painting itself that made waves. To the institutional avant-garde these seemed reactionary in their expressionism, their novocento imagery, and their gaudy excess. To more classical-minded connoisseurs, their intentional badness made them seem just another assault from the iconoclast’s endless armory. The evocation of Francis Picabia’s “transparencies” was enough to suggest Dadaist provocation.

Mr. Schnabel was “maximalist” – he didn’t give painting “everything but the kitchen sink” as much as everything that was in it. Along with smashed crockery, he threw slices of animal hide, Mexican and Greek souvenir pottery, and a magisterially weathered log found on the beach into his pictures. Supports include luxurious and rubbishy materials like tarpaulin, velvet, and found doors. It was as if he were offering himself up as a one-man Baroque to complement the arte povera renaissance of the previous decade, with its emphasis on humble materials and dreary absences of color.

A secular Jew, Mr. Schnabel even threw in opulently Catholic iconography to match his forms and textures: “Resurrection: Albert Finney Meets Malcolm Lowry” is the title of a 1984 painting that uses wax, graffitti-writer’s aerosol, and molding plate on ecclesiastically purple velvet. It could be argued that Mr. Schnabel traded in a stereotype of Catholicism: all emotional physicality and pietist excess. However oafish and insolent his use of pictorial languages, the impulse seems borne of a genuine and expressively desperate nostalgia for a lost order in which images could generate veneration.

At another level, however, his imagery set out to shock. “Ethnic Types #15 and #72” throws an Indian and an African face into an exotic mix of animal-hide cutouts, with picture-book Romanesque chalices and crudely painted animal motifs to keep them company. Mr. Schnabel’s racial imagery, like that of his contemporaries Eric Fischl and David Salle, seemed to swing with the pendulum against the political correctness of the 1970s art world.

“Ritu Quadrupedis” (1987) can literally be read as a manifesto painting: Made up of the words of its title drawn in big white block letters, except for the first two “Us,” which are brown, with an appropriated religious banner covering the “U” of “Ritu,” the letters fill a cruciform (Greek cross) tarpaulin support, over which yellow paint is then splattered and besmirched, at times suggestive of footprints.

In its hubristic ambiguity, the image is typical Schnabel. The phrase comes from religious literature. St. Teresa, for instance, was said to have walked around her convent ritu quadrupedis, on four legs, as a sign of humility. But that is not a virtue that springs to mind with Mr. Schnabel, who instead stresses animal passion and brute indifference to received conventions.

This certainly tallies with the mystique of the artist in this exhibition’s catalog. Photographs show the bear like Mr. Schnabel standing outside his Hamptons house in pajamas, wearing sunglasses like a Blues Brother, or seated in a cavernous studio, again in pajamas. Like his painting style and iconography, this studiously nonchalant sartorial choice seems publicly private.

A note in the catalogue by C&M chairman, Robert Mnuchin, recounts his own experience of viewing works hanging on the fence of the artist’s tennis court. This might seem a trifling anecdote, but at a certain level it suggests itself as a mixed metaphor (brash and courtly, sporting and aspiring, alienated and at home) of this at once complex and endearingly simple modern painter.

Until June 4 (45 E. 78th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, 212-861-0020). Prices: $575,000.