PARIS — I happened to have been in the audience the evening Julian Schnabel arrogantly declared that the closest thing the current art world had to Picasso was himself. That jokey assertion can be easily tested at the Musée d’Orsay by taking in the outstanding Picasso Blue and Rose exhibition and then ambling up a floor to see Schnabel’s conceptually pointless, self-curated Orsay through the Eyes of Julian Schnabel. The brash, obstreperous, high-macho bombast of Schnabel’s work does not come close to Picasso’s intelligent, sensitive, and brilliantly bold art.

The juxtaposition of 13 paintings from the museum’s 19th-century collection with 11 Schnabel works from the last 40 years — timed to promote the release of Schnabel’s film about Vincent van Gogh, At Eternity’s Gate — does nothing to change my critical evaluation of Schnabel’s frightful paintings as the epitome of 1980s self-flattering macho excess. (He is a much better filmmaker.) Indeed, his exorbitant exercise in ego had me pitying the mannerist, bulldozing, Neo-Expressionist artist. Does his Trump-like blind faith in himself blind him that badly? (Also, Orsay can you see?) His work, long contemptuous of the prevailing pieties of “good taste,” looks terrible in this context. He really wants us to compare such pretentious and poorly painted twaddle as “Portrait of Tatiana Lisovskaia as the Duquesa de Alba II” (2014) to Henri Fantin-Latour’s delicately refined “Chrysanthèmes in a Vase” (1873)?

Furthermore, there is something corny, boring, and dull about Orsay through the Eyes of Julian Schnabel because it is too self-involved to even play the coy (and tired) game of fake-crushing the “high art/popular culture” divide and I have an anathema for that anyway. The work’s forced “high art” context does not create an estrangement or distancing effect that might draw us into an attitude of new appreciation. There is no defamiliarization going on here that might offer other critical judgments besides regarding his screwball paintings as a form of anti-intellectualism. Worse, Schnabel’s shameless self-presentation of his gross gargantuan canvases within this refined European “high art” context may seem an example of classic ugly Americanism, here performed as ill- proportioned psychic dominance.

The show starts with some of Schnabel’s earliest works, including the large-scale signature plate painting “Blue Nude with Sword” (1979) (painted on broken crockery) that he hung next to Cézanne’s much smaller and much better painting “The Strangled Woman” (1876). This painting by Cézanne greatly impressed me when I saw it in the Sade: Attacking the Sun show, also at Musée d’Orsay a few years ago. Besides a somewhat similar palette, these two very different depictions of aggressive male behavior have little to do with each other and Schnabel’s piece ends up looking exceedingly crude next to Cézanne’s. On the other hand, I would certainly have enjoyed seeing “Blue Nude with Sword” hung in the Park Güell in Barcelona, since it was somewhat inspired by Antoni Gaudí’s marvelous mosaic work.

Another woeful pairing for no discernible reason other than their parity in scale places one of Schnabel’s better tacky, figurative combine-paintings “The Exile” (1980) (a typical Neo-Expressionist aggressive gesture with jutting moose antlers) with the psychologically superior Cézanne painting of his fellow artist “Achille Emperaire” (1868). In it Cézanne emphasizes Emperaire’s fragile and deformed body. I last viewed this painting in the Portraits by Cézanne Musée d’Orsay show last year where I found it as oddly touching as an Ian Dury album.