The Fine Art of [William S. Schwartz] // 03.29.2024

Between 1930 and 1932, it’s hard to fathom what William S. Schwartz (1896-1977) was doing other than painting his Symphonic Forms, the series of musical abstractions he would eventually become best known for. In a fervent rush of inspiration over the course of those three years, he made somewhere between eighteen and twenty-three of the Symphonic paintings. Then, just as suddenly, he stopped, not picking them up again in earnest for nearly two decades, at which point they had changed dramatically.

There had been several premonitions to this initial prolific period: a critic in 1926 who wrote that Schwartz “does not lay down his brush till he has achieved the effect of a symphony”; Schwartz’s first genuine dabbling in abstraction, Western Sunset—a painting that handily blends the natural world with the abstract—which in retrospect was a clear precursor to the later Symphonic Forms; and, well, there was the fact that he had a full-fledged career as an opera singer, touring the nation and singing tenor with the Bohemian Opera Company in Chicago in the early 1920s before he decided the visual arts were his true calling. 

Symphonic Forms #5 is an early example in the Symphonic series (for a later Symphonic Form, see Symphonic Forms from the Sea below). Typical of the paintings in this first phase, references to nature are apparent in Symphonic Forms #5, though not without some degree of distortion and elements of the mysterious. A bundle of large, leafy forms command the center of the composition, draping themselves over towers of dark grey (perhaps rock formations?) and obscuring some of the strange, blood-red swaths behind them. Below, striated layers of deep green and beige suggest geological strata, with stacks of small, wave-like mountains sitting on top, a flame of orange shooting out of one. Behind all of this is a backdrop that lies somewhere between a sky and a curtain, the lighter blue of the center giving way to glowing folds of a deeper gray-blue, as if something is being birthed or revealed, a performance just getting started. “Whether this work is a new phase, a new departure, I do not know, but this is the style toward which my art has tended from the beginning,” Schwartz wrote of his Symphonic Forms in 1932.

So what of the title? The trio of vibrating lines in the upper right seem to provide the only overt allusion to an orchestral composition, maybe a violin’s strings floating across space and time. In 1935, Schwartz did clarify with a reporter that he understood certain colors to correspond with different instruments (blue-grey=violin, orange=clarinet, etc.), and that his habit of repeating forms was, to his mind, like the different parts of an orchestra taking up the same melody or phrase. But Schwartz’s deeper thesis can be found in this quote from 1932: “Viewing these paintings is like listening to music, but it is the spectator who ‘makes’ the music.” We may all see the same thing, or close to it, but the songs we each hear will be entirely our own.

To inquire about Symphonic Forms #5, head here. For more information about Symphonic Forms of the Sea, go here. And for more about the life of William S. Schwartz, check out Madron Press’s publication William S. Schwartz: Color and Coloratura (which you can purchase here, or if you’re in the Chicagoland area, check it out from your local library!)