Faith and Freedom

William S. Schwartz synthesized his own unique brand of modernism, encompassing the avant-garde techniques of Europe and the boundless possibilities of America

By John Dorfman

While New York is without doubt the center of the American art world, Chicago has long had a lively art scene all its own, often cheerfully indifferent to the preoccupations of the East and West Coasts. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in particular has been an incubator of creativity, from the academic realist painters of the late 19th century to the Monster Roster, the Hairy Who, and the Chicago Imagists of the mid- to late 20th. One of its students, William Samuel Schwartz, became a well-known figure in the Chicago art world from the 1920s through the 1970s, producing works influenced by a wide variety of styles, from Neo-Impressionism to Fauvism, American Scene Painting, and Surrealism. Schwartz, a strong and eccentric personality, often combined elements from several of these schools in one painting, and resolutely refused to be boxed in by any critical canons. In 1970, he summed up his career by saying, “No one has told me I must depict this or that I must not venture upon that. I have painted in faith and in freedom—faith that somehow what I have done will reflect the best that is in me—freedom to choose my own themes in my own way.”

William S. Schwartz, Galena, Illinois, circa 1935, watercolor and gouache on paper, 17 1⁄2 x 24 in.
Photograph courtesy of Madron Gallery

The full story of Schwartz’s life and work is told for the first time in a book being published this month, William S. Schwartz: Color and Coloratura, by Alex Cornacchia (Madron Press). As related in the book, Schwartz was an immigrant to the U.S., and he brought with him an immigrant’s wide-eyed wonder as well as a determination to reinvent himself, as many times as necessary. He was born in 1896 in Smorgon, Russia, a small city, now in Belarus, that was a center of Jewish culture. Schwartz’s father, a butcher, was comparatively wealthy and able to pay for his son to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vilna (now in Lithuania). But when William finished his course there and applied to the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts, he was rejected for being Jewish. In 1912, the family decided that it would be a good idea for William to be sent out of Russia to find greater opportunities and escape antisemitism and the rising danger of world war and revolution. He sailed for New York, which impressed him greatly: “I was utterly unprepared for my first impression of America,” he recalled decades later. “That impression, in one word, was power! The sheer physical bulk of New York engulfed me.” However, he was unable to establish himself there, and after less than a year he accepted an invitation from relatives in Omaha, Neb., to come live with them. In Omaha, Schwartz did what he had to do to make ends meet, earning money by painting houses and selling newspapers, but he still managed to continue his art training, studying with John Laurie Wallace, a portrait painter who had studied with Thomas Eakins.

In 1916 Schwartz moved to Chicago. He was 20 years old, on the cusp of adulthood and life as an artist, and “the city of broad shoulders” was entering a bold new phase of economic and cultural growth. He had only $10 in his pocket when he got there, but he hustled continuously, waiting on tables, singing in vaudeville shows (he had received strong musical training in Russia alongside his art studies), working in a glove factory, and again painting houses. With the money he made, he was able to enroll at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where his main teacher was Karl A. Buehr, an American Impressionist who was generally conservative in approach but open to new influences. When Schwartz rendered a nude model in shades of blue and green, Buehr was surprised but didn’t censure. Working with Buehr gained Schwartz a solid skill in realist depiction that undergirds all his subsequent work, whether realist, Surrealist, or abstract. Among the friends he made at the Institute, the closest was Anthony Angarola, a Chicago-born Italian-American artist who became famous for his avant-garde painting and macabre book illustrations (H.P. Lovecraft was a fan, and Angarola had planned to illustrate one of Lovecraft’s stories but was killed in a car accident in 1929, at the age of 36, before it could come to fruition.).

From Window #29, 1937, oil on Masonite, 30 x 24 in.
Photograph courtesy of Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York

Like New York, Chicago inspired Schwartz with its intense energy and architectural pizzazz. In his 1937 painting From Window #29, he gives us a view of towering skyscrapers in the background and humble row houses in the middle distance, all nicely framed by a curtained window that evokes a theater’s proscenium. The woman over whose shoulder we are looking is Schwartz’s wife, Mona. They met when her then-husband, Chicago businessman Emanuel Dresner, commissioned Schwartz to paint a double portrait of him and Mona; she and Schwartz fell in love, and she left Dresner for him. Despite the initial skepticism of many who knew them, the marriage proved solid, lasting until Schwartz’s death in 1977, and it was a happy match in several ways. Mona was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist and had money of her own, which she used to support Schwartz in his work. She was also an artistic inspiration and is depicted in many of his compositions. He called her his “best friend and least lenient critic.”

Schwartz’s work of the 1920s and ’30s is predominantly figurative, in a variety of styles. Despite his strong desire to redefine himself as an American and leave his European past behind, he made several memorable depictions of Jewish life in Belarus. Old Country Bazaar (1926) combines a folkloric quality with a Cubist-influenced compression of space and exaggeration of the angles of the houses. The vivid colors—a lifelong Schwartz trademark—contrast notably with the darkness of the buildings, fences, and sky, suggesting the dark forces of poverty and violence that Jews faced in Russia. A Village Landscape (1927) is even more tenebrous and more modernistic in its distortion of space.

In his portrayals of the American landscape, Schwartz was more positive. In Galena, Illinois (circa 1935), he again deploys a dark sky against bright colors on the ground. The sky is darkened not only by clouds but by factory smoke, while the green hills, town streets, and buildings glow in bright sunlight. With its combination of social realism and celebration of small-town life, this painting belongs with the American Scene school of the Depression years, Paintings such as Grand Central Hotel and The Riverboat adopt a style reminiscent of folk art to depict rural America and its lifeways. These and other similar works are the fruit of extensive road trips that Mona and William Schwartz took during the 1930s in search of subject matter.

A more symbolic approach to the landscape is apparent in two very different paintings, The Pioneers (1924) and Crystal Falls (circa 1942). In the former, the procession of tiny figures against backdrop of fantastical cliffs and otherworldly-looking foliage suggests the hopeful arrival of refugees in a promised land, and the line and color work create an effect reminiscent of Tiffany stained glass. In the latter, an American village perches on a green hill under a lowering sky as a single shaft of sunlight pierces the clouds; the painting owes a large debt to El Greco’s View of Toledo (1600). Of this and similar works, Art Institute of Chicago director Daniel Catton Rich wrote, “This is no longer America, but a land of Schwartz’s brooding invention. Rich and brilliant color playing over a drab Illinois prairie changes it into something new and strangely moving.”

Symphonic Forms from the Sea (Symphonic Forms No. 57), circa 1963, oil on canvas, 36 x 40 in.
Photograph courtesy of Madron Gallery

In addition to Cézanne and Cubism, Schwartz was strongly influenced by Surrealism and Kandinskian color abstraction. Ballet of the Woods (1951) showcases a Surrealistic type of biomorphic abstraction in which the neutral-toned forms at the center of the composition could be seen as either human or vegetal—like a mandrake root or like the pieces of driftwood that Schwartz liked to collect and hang on the walls of his home. The background is geometric abstraction in a symphony of soft, interpenetrating colors redolent of Synchromism.

This musical approach to color and form found its fullest expression in Schwartz’s last major body of work, the Symphonic Forms, which he began in the late 1930s and continued up until the time of his death. Schwartz’s early musical education made a deep impression on him, and in fact he had been a professional singer, of both popular music and opera, for a number of years in the ’teens and ’20s; an early ink-on-paper drawing, I Pagliacci (1916) depicts a singer in costume for the famous sad-clown role in Leoncavallo’s opera of that title. The synesthetic impulse in art, the quest for visual equivalents for musical sounds, dates back at least to the turn of the 20th century, when the Theosophists Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater published Thought-Forms (1901), a small book that included reproductions of paintings that claimed to translate well-known classical symphonies into colored abstractions.

Schwartz’s Symphonic Forms often tread a middle ground between abstraction and figuration, with elements of nature such as trees and mountains seeming to coalesce amid the geometric and biomorphic shapes and passages of color. Schwartz explained in writing that he assigned different colors to different parts of the orchestra; for example, blue-gray and rose for violins, blues and oranges for clarinets, maroons and dark blues for bassoons and double-basses. Sometimes he would seek to express one particular composition in a painting, as in Appassionata, his visual version of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor (the “Appassionata sonata”), while most of his musical paintings are more general, or incarnate musical creations that existed only in the mind of the artist (however, while painting in the studio Schwartz preferred listening to Chicago Cubs games on the radio to classical music). For example, one his most fully realized and most abstract music paintings, Symphonic Forms from the Sea (Symphonic Forms #57), from around 1963, shows a theme being echoed in several ways, expanding across the canvas, much as a musical theme would be taken up by different sections of an orchestra or recur with variations throughout a composition.

Ballet of the Woods, circa 1951, oil on canvas, 29 1⁄2 x 35 1⁄2 in.
Photograph by Monika Labbé

Schwartz was a devotee of the self-portrait, and as a larger-than-life personality did not shy away from bold depictions of himself in various guises. A 1928 lithograph shows the artist as Jesus—a move that earned him abuse from more than one quarter, and not least because of his Jewishness. (Actually, the use of Christian symbolism by Jewish artists, including Marc Chagall, is a consistent phenomenon in early modernism.) In the same year, Schwartz portrayed himself in Spirits as a heavy drinker confronted by a bottle filled with Cubist and Futurist-looking scenes and figures. And in Self-Portrait (1950), he peers out, one eye hidden, from amid a congeries of Surrealist and abstract forms, seeming to gaze upon two worlds simultaneously, the outer and the inner.

After the 1940s, Schwartz’s career began a long decline. He no longer showed at the Art Institute’s annual exhibitions and felt that he didn’t fit into the new art world dominated by gestural abstraction. He did some advertising artwork, occasionally lectured and taught, but basically retreated to his studio and painted for himself, continuing productively along the paths that he established for himself. A true American original, he refused categorization and always marched to his own drummer. Today, his works are being given renewed attention, their combination of imagination and technical mastery on display for a new generation of viewers.