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

As both Schwabsky and Landauer point out, images of reading and writing occur frequently in Schwartz's work, and may in some cases stand in for the creative act. Schwartz's book-size paintings seem meant to be "read," their images not unlike parables or proverbs: two men exchange money at the edge of a precipice, while a nearby ladder invites a dangerous ascent to pick a single bright red fruit, in The Tight Fit (Exchange), 1993; five figures paddle furiously and futilely in a circular rowboat (Disinheritance, 1999). From visits to Berlin's Gemaldegalerie, Schwartz was familiar with Brueghel's Proverbs (1559), a painting illustrating dozens of individual Netherlandish maxims; he did something similar in The Thicket (1999), with its 10 mysterious scenes, each in a separate room, revealed in a cutaway view of an apartment building.

But just as a parable's message is the story, the interest in a Schwartz painting lies in the image itself, not in any moral drawn from it. One has the nagging, humbling feeling that any pronouncement one makes about the meaning is rendered irrelevant by the very act of making it. No sooner do we think we understand the painting in any literal sense than, with all its contradictions and ambiguities, it coolly and flatly denies a final reading. Schwartz encourages us to invent our own stories, which may or may not be the "true" ones, from fragmentary scenes presented on stage sets, or glimpsed through windows and doors, or unfolding in claustrophobic streets and in landscapes that breathe an air of quotation. As complete and self-contained as they seem, these works remain open-ended, their revelation not so much in a fixity of interpretation as in the idea of meaning.

"Dream Games: The Art of Robert Schwartz" was on view at the San Jose Museum of Art [Sept. 10, 2004-Jan. 16, 2005]. It was accompanied by a 200-page, illustrated catalogue with essays by curator Susan Landauer and critic Barry Schwabsky. Hackett-Freedman Gallery in San Francisco showed "Robert Schwartz: Selected Works, 1984-2000" [Dec. 2 2004-Jan. 29, 2005].

The author thanks Claire Antonetti and Ron Jehu for their assistance, and dedicates this article to Dudley Syler

Author: Nathan Kernan lives in New York. He is writing a biography of the poet James Schuyler.

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