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The painted parables of Robert Schwartz: diminutive gouaches by the late San Francisco artist incorporate old-master allusions and theatrical artifices within a highly emblematic display. A recent exhibition offered a rare overview of Schwartz's mature career

Art in America, Feb, 2005 by Nathan Kernan

In a monochrome blue light, amid a cold landscape of bare trees and gentle hillocks, a nude male and female couple bathes, embracing in what looks like a flooded quarry or ruin, surrounded by a wall of tenting. Outside the curtain, two women, also entwined, watch the couple through a gap. An unearthly orange glow suffuses what little sky is visible. The enigmatic scene is titled Painted on a Leaf (1999), but it was, in fact, painted in gouache on a sheet of paper measuring only 4 1/4 by 5 inches, in exquisite miniaturist detail, by the late artist Robert Schwartz.

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Little known outside San Francisco, where he lived from 1971 until his sudden death in 2000, Schwartz was born in Chicago in 1947. His talent was recognized early. While he was still an undergraduate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he had a solo show of drawings at the prestigious Richard Gray Gallery, and he participated in a group exhibition of figurative work at the Museum of Contemporary Art alongside artists of Chicago's Hairy Who group. On graduating in 1970, he might have been expected to stay in Chicago, where a career seemed assured, or to go to New York. Instead, he moved for personal reasons to San Francisco, a city, like Chicago, with an indigenous tradition of funky figurative art. Eventually he gained local renown for his tiny, highly idiosyncratic gouaches depicting dreamlike alternate worlds with the precision and elegance of old-master paintings.

With their strangely garbed protagonists and inexplicable (or peculiarly unremarkable) activities and settings. Schwartz's paintings seem pregnant with obscure meaning. He referred to them as "emblematic." but unlike Renaissance emblem books or medieval illuminations, which conveyed specific messages to contemporary viewers. Schwartz's imagery resists definitive interpretations. His dark forests, luminous skies. vulnerable boats and compressed cityscapes his readers, disputants, lovers and solitary figures. remain puzzling even as they wordlessly communicate to us. as he put it "certain truths about being human"

A small but concise retrospective of 56 paintings, curated by Susan Landauer at the San Jose Museum of Art, helped to give Schwartz the wider exposure he deserves. Except for a small, rather haphazard selection of works on paper shown in a side gallery in the museum, the focus was on a coherent body of mature paintings, extending over his last 15 years. Regrettably, the exhibition did not include works executed before 1984, which are unfamiliar even to those who know Schwartz's later oeuvre well. In fact, the show represented only about half the span of his career, the earlier part of which provides illuminating background to his final period.

In Chicago, Schwartz had already begun to work figuratively and in the relatively "minor" medium of gouache on paper or board, and on a very small scale. He would continue to do so, with some excursions into abstraction and oil painting, for the rest of his career. His first exhibition in San Francisco, at the storefront Upper Market Street Gallery in 1972, consisted of a series of small gouaches of young men's faces portrayed frontally, which he called "Saints," along with a group of wood and stitched-cloth totemic sculptures, abstract but implicitly figural. (Schwartz continued to make sculpture throughout his life, though it was seldom exhibited.) Despite the "saints" designation, Schwartz was not religious in a conventional sense. According, though, to his sister Claire Antonetti, he was fascinated by the idea of religion, and developed a special interest in the imagery and traditions of Roman Catholicism that would continue throughout his life. (Schwartz, his brother and two sisters were brought up Lutheran, their mother's faith, with little exposure to their father's Jewish heritage.) A copy of the Penguin Dictionary of Saints was a constant reference, and one senses the possibility of its eccentric narratives behind the iconlike faces of the "Saints"--and behind his later work, as well.

In the early '70s, Schwartz moved on to images of suburban figures with erotic overtones posed on outdoor terraces, and for the time being the work lost any religious connotations, while the sense of unspecified narrative was heightened. This was followed, in the mid-'70s, by a group of extraordinary architectural fantasies showing modernist structures perched on rocky islands or summits. While they are both scary and beautiful in their austerity and isolation, there is also something in the individuality of these imaginary buildings that hints at human complexities and contradictions.

In a sense, it was through a kind of abdication of originality that Schwartz came to his own original style. In the early to mid-'70s (and continuing, apparently, to the end), he began skillfully "appropriating" old-master landscapes in paintings created as gifts for his lover, Dudley Syler, which were never shown publicly. Unlike his exhibited work, these paintings were sometimes executed at a relatively large scale, as much as 5 by 6 feet, and in oil on canvas. Most often they borrowed just the styles of various European masters from the 16th to 18th centuries, but one undated work, Untitled (Hunting Scene) is a very close restatement of Brueghers Hunters in the Snow (1565), incorporating the high vantage point and virtually all the elements of Brueghel's painting, though in a slightly different configuration.

The painted parables of Robert Schwartz: diminutive gouaches by the late San Francisco artist incorporate old-master allusions and theatrical artifices within a highly emblematic display. A recent exhibition offered a rare overview of Schwartz's mature career

Art in America, Feb, 2005 by Nathan Kernan

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