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

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.

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.

Starting in the mid-'80s, where the San Jose exhibition commenced (as did a smaller, concurrent show at Hackett-Freedman Gallery, his dealer in San Francisco since 1990), the old-masterly landscape imagery and technique began to cross over into Schwartz's exhibited work, in gouaches that placed vaguely 18th-century-garbed figures in Romantic-inflected, rock landscapes. The focus was increasingly on the figures, who act out private dramas in a wide variety of invented, theatrical and sometimes half-familiar settings. Stating that he wanted his technique to be "perfect" so that it would not distract from the subject, Schwartz took pains in the preparation of his paintings, plotting the compositions carefully and using preliminary drawings from live models. One might expect the very precision of his technique at such a small scale to become a distraction, but instead it lends a kind of credibility or authority to the image, claiming our heightened attention. As time passed, Schwartz's allusions to old-master painting became more subtle. The half-crouching pose of a man walking out of a lake in More Lost? (1999), for example, is reminiscent of that of the main figure in Bosch's famous Prodigal Son (1500), bringing a subliminal association to our understanding of the figure's relationship to the rather grim, topee-hatted lady welcoming him. No mere reactionary, Schwartz was also interested in and informed about contemporary art that might look very different from his own (Smithson's Spiral Jetty, for example, appears as a ditch in Serenade II, 1993).

New York artists of Schwartz's generation whose works bear similarities to his include Joan Nelson (for small-scale precision and the appropriation of old-master landscape) and early Robert Greene (for fantastic figurative scenes with obscure personal meanings). Frank Moore created highly finished, emblematic and historically referential works, though at a much larger scale, and with explicitly political content. In light, too, of figurative, art-historically allusive younger artists like John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, Schwartz looks quite prescient today.

Schwartz loved opera, often citing Rossini and Verdi as influences, but those composers' appeal to his imagination was probably due as much to opera's artifice--fabulous costumes and sets, hieratic, nonnaturalistic acting conventions and intricate, sometimes outlandish plots--as to the lyrical inventiveness of their music. In a Schwartz painting, everything--not only people but also trees, roads, skies--seems to be laden with potential significance. His narratives are carried out in exaggerated attitudes and gestures, and sometimes take place in structures that resemble theater sets or stages. In The Heart and All the Bones of the Foot (1990), nude male and female models assume classically derived poses on an elaborately configured podium; they are observed and apparently critiqued by three men. Here, as in Painted on a Leaf and the 1990 Living on Grasshoppers, an act is watched within the narrative, turning protagonist into performer and observer into audience. (The male figure in The Heart ... with his back turned and hand outstretched hints, too, at 1950s softcore male nude photographs of the sort distributed, supposedly as artists' aids, by the Athletic Model Guild, not to mention the photographs of George Platt Lynes or the earlier gouaches and egg-tempera paintings of Paul Cadmus).

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.

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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