Henry Schwartz: The Boulevard of Broken Dreams — Approaching the Vanishing Point

Nelson Da Costa: Mirrors

February 1 — February 23 at Gallery NAGA

For the past seventeen years the masterful final paintings of Henry Schwartz, a key Boston expressionist, have been in storage, unexhibited and virtually unseen.  On February 1 they will be shown for the first time, in what is, for those close to Gallery NAGA and to this broadly influential painter, the most keenly anticipated presentation of “historical” material in the gallery’s 31-year history.

Concurrently, the gallery presents the debut exhibition of the young painter Nelson  Da Costa, born in Angola, trained in Cuba, and now pursuing an MFA in Boston, having achieved political asylum in the United States.

In the opinion of many, Henry Schwartz is the most important and certainly the most unusual second-generation Boston expressionist, following the generation of Hyman Bloom, Jack Levine, and Karl Zerbe (Schwartz’s mentor), who defined contemporary art in post-World War II Boston.  Admirers themselves of the German expressionists, their painting was dark in palette and in mood, and often caustic about human folly.  Their work was in the mainstream at such institutions as Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art in the late 1940s and early 1950s, until abstract expressionism swept away it and all other schools, for reasons arguably as political as they were aesthetic.

Schwartz emerged in 1953 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston as a wunderkind, shown before graduation by the eminent Boris Mirski Gallery and lauded in the Boston art press for the philosophical ambition and painterly panache of his work.  A long career of Boston exhibition and teaching at the Museum School followed through the 1980s.  Schwartz’s work ranged from the profoundly serious (The Objective Correlative: T. S. Eliot sitting pensively before a huge brain-like pile of Holocaust-suggesting corpses) to the giddily serious (The Birthpangs of Modern Music and the Stretch Marks of History: an Olympus of classical composers emerging from naked female bodies, who seem both generative muses and exhausted victims).

Schwartz’s influence on decades of Museum School students and Boston painters was pervasive, and many consider themselves to be operating in the lineage of Boston expressionism.  The exuberant painter Gerry Bergstein, for one, considers Schwartz his mentor.  “Henry was my most important teacher and a major influence in my work,” Bergstein says.  “I am far from alone as an artist who feels this way.”
In 1990 the Fuller Museum of Art mounted to acclaim the retrospective Henry Schwartz, showing 81 works created over a 40-year span.  Shortly thereafter, Schwartz plunged into a debilitating depression which defied treatment for 16 years before lifting in early 2007.  Now 80, his recent return to good cheer is unfortunately accompanied by significant physical problems, which will likely prevent his attending the exhibition.  He reads, listens to classical music, and draws, but he has not painted since 1991.

The eight paintings in the NAGA exhibition, retrieved from his studio during his 1991 hospitalization, include Self Portrait Sculpting a Head of Bruckner, a portrait of Mahler, and six phantasmagorical evocations of Schwartz’s adolescence in 1940s Revere, a mix of carny, burlesque, boardwalk, amusement park, horse track, and yearning pubescence.  In Orient Heights, for example, an open-mouthed female figure is both bewitchingly erotic and cardboard-false, her mouth gaping like a tunnel-of-love ride.  The tears on her face don’t look quite real either, and that’s apt, since her eyes, pasted beneath the clear Plexiglas on which she’s painted, are taken from the Man Ray photo of the woman with fake tears on her cheek.  Thoroughbreds gallop out of her hair toward a circular track on her breast, where tall stacks smoke.  It’s amazing, tortured, and beautiful.

Nelson Da Costa, who is 36, was born in the Angolan town of Kwanze Norte, where his youth was scarred by war.  As a nine-year-old child, he witnessed the brutal murder of his father.  Two years later, soldiers killed his mother, his two brothers, and his sister.  At age 12, he spent six months in a hospital after being shot.  It was in that hospital that Da Costa began to discover the power of art.  “One of the doctors gave me some colors and paper,” he recalls.  “As I recovered, I realized that drawing and painting had a very big impact on me.”

He emigrated to Cuba at age 14, and came to Boston in 2002 to focus seriously on making art.  “I have a story to tell,” Da Costa says, “about the experiences I have been through.  I use art to communicate about war and destruction, about sadness and poverty, about death and where people are going when they die.”

Da Costa completes graduate studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston this spring.  His current work, based in portraits, is a construction of memories.  “I lost specific memory,” he says.  “These are people I miss, I lost.  I left Angola in 1984, traumatized. These are the people I’m displaced from.”

His paintings, a layering of webs of stark images, construct human forms from silhouetted nets of figures and forms both playful and explosive, broken apart and pulling together.  Da Costa explains, “They’re also metaphors for memories, for neurons and brain functioning.”