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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
The decision to portray arrested movement as a means of expression can lend the scenes a static, tableau-vivant quality. In A Diplomat's Career (1995), a man and woman seem frozen in place, despite the fact that their small boat is about to capsize and a wild boar on the bank is attacking the man's leg; with their mouths open (like many other of Schwartz's characters), they look like nothing so much as singers in the middle of an improbable duet. The personages in A Diplomat's Career seem self-conscious, as if they know they are facing an audience. While in certain paintings that audience is depicted, here the woman looks out at us, which seems to call for our response. As John Ashbery's lines have it, "It is we, our taking it into account rather, that are / The reply that prompted the question."
In his catalogue essay for the San Jose exhibition, critic Barry Schwabsky astutely wonders why Schwartz, who was gay, almost always depicted heterosexual couples in paintings with erotic content. I have a feeling it never really occurred to him to make specifically gay paintings, any more than specifically realist paintings or actual portraits. Just as Schwartz embraced a traditional idiom in order, as he said, to create narrative transparency, so he embodied his personal feeling in conventional guises that would not distract from what was most important and universal in the work. Then again, one might argue that, for a gay artist (or person), accustomed from an early age to applying congruent messages to prevailing images of heterosexual love, the whole world is already emblematic, and the ability to recapture deeply felt emotions through symbolic representations, in art as in life, almost second nature.
Schwartz's interest in narratives of sainthood (just as fantastic as those in opera) continued to surface in his work, albeit in oblique and nonspecific ways. Protagonists in many Schwartz paintings seem to be undergoing private trials or crises--martyrdoms, even--of one kind or another. Beyond the obvious erotic implications, the kneeling figure who bares his buttocks as if for flagellation in Charging into Night (1998) might suggest a member of some ascetic monastic sect, if not for the Aubusson carpet on the floor and scarlet-draped baldachin over the bed. The writer-protagonist of the sublime A Narrow Way (1999) appears to be suffering a sort of crisis of faith regarding the value of his own work. Looking a little like Schwartz, but also suggesting a possible version of St. Augustine or St. Jerome, he gazes with anguish away from his writing table in a room whose walls are covered with short blocks of writing, perhaps journal notations. Behind him stands not Jerome's lion, but a golden-haired youth who can only be described as "angelic," apparently gathering pages already written.
In the late '90s, fantastic costumes and hairstyles and the sometimes illogical constructed sets in which the figures posed gradually gave way to scenes still strange but less obviously theatrical. An eerily muted mood is sometimes obtained through a severely limited, even single-hued palette, in works such as the mostly red How My Aunt Appears (1999) or The Aesthete (1998), which depicts in ocher tones a plainly dressed man casually leaning against the trunk of a tree but somehow, inexplicably, suspended some 3 feet off the ground. Would That I Didn't Know (1999) could represent a simple, bucolic winter scene: four men are gathered in a snowy wood, three of them around what appears to be a small incinerator or smoke-house. Yet in addition to its austere poetry, the painting exerts an ominousness. Are the three figures depicted beside the brick structure just resting, or are they mortally exhausted, despairing, dead? Their poses simultaneously recall those of Brueghel yokels lounging around after finishing some obscure task and soldiers asleep before Christ's tomb in Renaissance depictions of the Resurrection. The painting's first-person title and play on words invite us to identify the solitary man standing apart in the foreground, his rapt gaze directed out of the picture, to some degree with the painter, and to endow him with special, perhaps painful, knowledge--or lack thereof.
