Aubrey Schwartz

American (1928 - )

Though really an "independent" and not beholden to any style, school, or movement, Schwartz's vision contributes to what we might call an American version of European Expressionism. (Expressionism used in the broadest sense to include such artists as Kollwitz, Barlach, Rouault.)

The intensity, the expressiveness, of his art suggests such an affinity. America seldom borrows directly from European culture; the best of American art, as with its thought and literature, is indigenous to its own place and temper--though sometimes inspired or agitated by European models. Expressionism is no exception. Its vision--both in subject matter and style--arose in the darkest period of European history and reached its zenith as that darkness, too, reached its apotheosis. Schwartz's work takes cognizance of this vision--this past--in an important way; as such it serves as countervail to much of the art of his American contemporaries. It reprises much that was truly marvellous and untapped within that remarkable tradition. It continues where modernism, one strain of modernism, leaves off; where art veers from the representational and figurative and turns cerebral and abstract

Aubrey Schwartz was born in New York City in 1928. His work at an early stage drew the attention of collectors and museum curators and won him many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Print-making. In 1969 he accepted a professorship at The State University of New York at Binghamton. He taught at that institution for many years (becoming in time Chair of its Department of Fine Art) and influenced the creative lives of many students, some of whom have gone on to distinguish themselves as artists.