“Julian Schnabel,” which opened on Sunday at the Brant Foundation’s Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, is, surprisingly, the first major U.S. survey of the artist’s work since his 1987 show at the Whitney Museum. Comprising nearly 50 works, mostly paintings and a few sculptures, the show spans the entirety of Schnabel’s career, from the early ’70s to the present. It’s an erratic journey through abstraction and realism, found objects and broken crockery, heftiness and humor — a fun if sometimes dizzying ramble.

The first couple of rooms, on the Center’s upper floor provide a sampling of output from the ’70s to the mid-’80s — there are works on paper, some graceful paintings on pillows, and a few abstract wax paintings on canvas. It’s a tasteful selection of promising early work, but it’s in the next gallery — a large, sky-lit room — that you arrive at the main event: several of Schnabel’s large-scale plate paintings from the late seventies and early eighties, works made from broken dishes or pottery affixed to a canvas or other surfaces and sometimes painted over. Several of these massive and weighty works — the smallest in the room is eight feet wide, the largest about 20 — are among those that brought him almost instant renown, in and outside the art world, when they were first exhibited at Mary Boone gallery in 1979. It is something to be surrounded, after all these years, by these Neo Expressionist icons, and for someone who wasn’t privy to that original cultural moment, it’s a real treat.

Due in part to their size, complexity, gravity, and historical aura, these works are the strongest in the show. Their jagged, encrusted surfaces, painted in muddy palettes of browns, blues, greens and pinks, convey a contemplative, monastic mood, — whether the works are abstract, like 1979’s “Divan” (white porcelain shards against a green backdrop), or figurative, like the 1981 landscape “The Sea” (composed of broken brown pottery painted blue with white waves and a piece of drift-wood affixed to the surface).

The plate paintings also offer some sense of continuity over time, since the artist returned to the medium throughout his career. The lower gallery contains examples of portraits done in this style from the ’90s and the aughts, like those of model Stephanie Seymour and the artist’s fiancée May Andersen, which are brighter and more glamorous in feeling.

Some of the sculptures, meanwhile, have a similar feel to the darker large-scale plate paintings. “Head on a Ramp” (1988), a flat, nine-foot long silvery object leaning against a wall on the upper floor and topped with a female head, appears burned, as if it had been salvaged from a raging fire. It has grit, but also a quiet, devotional beauty. “Gradiva” (1989) — a monstrous bronze looming somberly over one of the lower rooms like a relic of an obliterated civilization — is captivating, and more characteristically bombastic, but creates an odd tension with the cheery paintings behind it.

The sense of continuity falls away elsewhere the show, however. High up on one wall of a ground-floor gallery is a large painting of pink cherry blossoms over which hovers a pair of comically disembodied eyes peering out of a green sky — “Rebirth I: (The Last View of Camiliano Cien Fuegos)” (1986); nearby is what appears to be an homage to Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” “Untitled” (2012), in which the wanderer is a white billy goat standing on a cliff against a backdrop of purple-tinted cumulous clouds. They’re both delicately rendered, attractive paintings, but it’s not necessarily clear how he got from the plate paintings to these.

As seen here, Schnabel’s paintings and sculptures make for a chaotic mix of styles and moods, as if the artist were too easily delighted by the new and just as easily bored by it. This makes it difficult to get an overall sense of his work and its progression, which you want from a survey — a problem compounded by a dearth of works here made after the late ’80s.

The one thing that does connect most of these paintings is a kind of signature seductiveness — they’re painted on lush surfaces, like velvet, or rendered in a blend of oil and unctuous wax, or with a cool twist — like the matching paintings, each of a prim blonde school girl in a blue dress with her eyes obscured by a black strip, “Large Girl with No Eyes,” (2001). As appealing as that sensuousness can be, the works (as well as a fawning companion documentary film of Schnabel painting made by fellow artist Ahn Duong) often give the impression of being artifacts of a life lived vigorously and romantically rather than containing the vigor and romance themselves. Still, this is enough here for an enjoyable visit, and to see these works together after so much time in a handsome, light-filled space like the Art Study Center is a rare pleasure.