Victoria Thorson is a PhD art historian in New York City and leading art author, essayist and catalogue raisonné writer. Victoria is the author of the acclaimed book “Great Drawings of All Time : The Twentieth Century”.
B. R. Schwartz is internationally recognized as one of the most significant figurative sculptors working today. Her imagery merges transient emotions, connective energy, and profuse corporality.
She grew up in Zimbabwe and lived on the Copperbelt, Zambia until she moved to the United States and to Canada, where she was first introduced as a printmaker. During a span of five decades, she has created life-size figures, monumental relief panels, and a large body of work in painting and etching. Her prolific output displays technical virtuosity and unusual insight into the character of her subjects.
Thoroughly contemporary, her themes in sculpture include sacred gesture stripped of context in Noema and Noesis, past art reinvented in Maja Desnuda and Maja Vetida, and heroes and demons, like the Maldoror. Enacted by a figure alone or in an enigmatic grouping the subjects appear as self-contained messengers bearing inexplicable truths.
From her 1989 debut exhibition at the Vorpal Gallery in Soho, New York City, a group of life size, and larger, bronzes from the 1980s were acquired by international collections such as the Lipsanen Art Collection in Finland. Another sculpture from the group, a six foot three bronze titled The Girl with Golden Thread was shown at theGrand Palais in Paris. The figure expresses a complex alignment of strength and fragility through its majestic stride, delicately quivering contours, and touches of gold leaf, on the bosoms, hands, and belly. The artist also threaded fine wire through the figure’s hands “to create light and to give it some magic”, and as homage to Barbara Hepworth, whose work she admired.
Intent on capturing an imprint of her subjects, B.R. Schwartz allows her process to show through as a rough-textured build up of uneven strips and pellets of clay: “I think the whole beauty [lies]…in your natural finger marks and indentations in the clay, … in the hair there’s an organic quality.” Natural inflections, striated profiles, and exposed edges of bone, comprise a highly personal, intuitive layering that give her sculptures structural coherent while at the same time convey spontaneity and process. Her style of incorporating visible marks of modeling in clay is often compared to that of Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), who pioneered modern sculpture in Britain.
Unlike a male artist’s view of the nude as sensual object, B.R. Schwartz connects to the individualist chords of a woman’s psyche. There is a clarity and authority, a kinship with the subject that results. To the artist the nude is “an energy field and mass combined, the hurricane and infinity which is very hard to put into art.”
In her sculpture Celeste dated 1988, the nude model is caught in a scherzo movement that is at the same time playful and fierce. The torso twists to the right, a motion that is accentuated by the fluttering fingers of a model who was also a pianist. In forceful opposition, the lower body torques to the left, moving against a fulcrum that is the orb of her stomach. The same model, arms above her head and fingers each with its own trajectory, poses for the reclining Clouds and Rain #2, a title that signifies making love in ancient Chinese culture.
B. R. Schwartz’s drive as an artist is committed to exacting animate feeling and psychic energy from matter. The artist’s intention is to enter into an instinctive dialogue with her subjects and materials: “to summon from the amorphous material of clay a sensate feeling akin to the Makonde wood carvers of Burundi who sought to release the spirit of the tree.”
Though foremost her art is a voluble expression of the representation of nature, B. R. Schwartz also made a contribution to abstract and kinetic art movements of the 1960s and 70s. Fluidity in spatial massing can be seen in a brilliant body of work on exhibit at Gallery 101 in Johannesburg in 1975. Pure color abstractions and shapes derived from nature were constructed out of enameled copper. Some were mounted on color fields of painted gesso, attached to Plexiglas, and motorized. As a hybrid of painting and sculpture the style was sometimes called “field dynamics.” The abstractions of color blocking and play of mass and void from this period continue to carry over and give underlying strength to the artist’s representational work in both painting and sculpture.
Like the human body, the magnolia flower has provided an outlet for the artist to connect with her subject and extend her cosmic reach. The flower frequently appears in paintings and etchings, in addition to a tour de force in bronze from the 1980s, recently revised in 2012. In the bronze still life, large magnolia pedals retain their crisp and delicate contours while they persuasively project and enclose three-dimensional space. Schwartz’s bronze Magnolia Still-Life joins the rarefied domain of still life sculpture usually associated with artists such as Picasso and Botero. As a whimsical nod to the sculptured still lives of these masters, in 2013 Schwartz created a series of bronze hats with objects, set into the crowns, like the Canadian loon, a spike of a train rail, and a woman’s face.
In a larger presentation, but similarly related to the genre of performance art, the artist recently sculpted a life-size seated nude and a completely draped chair. She placed the woman in the chair, began a set of twelve matching bronze chairs, and added the companion piece of a chess set inspired by African phallic sculptures. Textured patterns, covering the nude subject’s forehead, hair, and arms, suggest the formality of a veil while she sits in the room fully exposed next to an empty bronze chair where sometimes a visitor sits or a bronze hat is casually found.
Recent work returns more strongly to the artist’s African roots where her school holidays, away from the convent school she attended since age six, were spent with her grandfather in the bush of Bulawayo. She saw in his dedication to the rugged place an affirmation of life and the earth, an essence that she sought to express throughout her artistic career. Deeply impressed by the country’s natural beauty and steeped in African symbolism and culture, the artist’s surroundings became her paradigm of truth. She looked for inspiration and subject matter to the human body, snakes, insects, birds, and animals of Africa, seen in a copper and enamel painting Two Women and a Crocodile, illustrated in a review from Hoofstad, Pretoria, of a one-person exhibition in 1975.
Africa was also a place where the fragility of life was imbedded in her artistic consciousness through vivid childhood memories: daily vigilance required turning her shoes upside down to check for scorpions; a snake slithering round her legs at bath time, elicited her screams which summoned her grandfather to shoot the snake between the eyes; lions’ pelts set with glass eyes arrived at the house of a playmate in great metal tins while the playmate’s brother’s game was to place seeds and rig a stone to drop on the birds that came to feed. Internalized feelings surfaced in works dealing with intimacy and connection as in the sculpture Woman Kneeling with Bird dated 2007. An intense sensitivity to living things is part of a recognition that came early in the artist’s career; in 1966, she said: “As far as I am aware all my work comes from deep inside.”
In another recent work from 2005, the sculpture Six Dancers incorporates a notion of menace, introduced by way of the metal, found objects inserted into the heads and echoed by aggressive claw-like gestures of the raised arms. Though based on a modern dance performance, the concentration of feeling springs from the artist’s memories of experiences in Africa. With complete mastery of her improvisational technique in clay the sculptor encapsulates the flux, extension, and serial action of dance. Similarly charged with strong emotional content and fluidity of style, Life, an oil of 2011, measuring 7′ x 5′, depicts a gathering of humanity, in which one man pokes his head toward a woman who is responsive only to the baby she holds, while another nude male postures enigmatically toward the viewer.
Drawing from an early age, B. R. Schwartz followed the usual channels where schools sent the best works from the colonies to exhibitions in London garnering awards. This led subsequently to exhibitions at the Sociétés des Artistes Français, the Royal Academy, London, Sapporo, Japan and elsewhere. Her work was shown at the National Gallery Zimbabwe’s annual exhibition of local artists from its opening in 1957 until she left the region in 1974.
In Zambia, she was “living on the copper belt, where I had the opportunity to do enormous projects for Anglo American, a copper fountain with florescent water and a garden with a waterfall and tree with copper leaves.” Schwartz’s production included etched copper lamp bases for State House, Zambia and enameled copper tiles, some inlaid with silver, for the oval walls of the visitors’ kiosk at the Civic Center building designed by architect Arthur Lewis in Chingola. The same vigor and innovative treatment shows in architectural commissions done in Canada such as her large translucent acrylic screens and window panels with intricate reliefs of foliage and butterflies.
Well-known critic and professor of fine art Fabio Barraclough wrote a review that still applies today: “I rate B. R. Schwartz in this international class for the range of her accomplishments, from drawings and landscape sketches of great refinement to the psychological depth of her portraits and the intensity of mood in her nudes.”
Considered as a contemporary humanist, B. R. Schwartz achieves a radiant physicality in her work through the layering of identity, mass, and connective currents.
In addition to government, corporate and private exhibits and commissions internationally, BR Schwartz is a long time contributor to the annual juried exhibit held by the Royal Academy in London as well as a medalist at the Le Salon in Paris awarded by the Société des Artistes Français.