Aubrey Schwartz

Black and white are not so much colors as they are all colors and none: white, technically, is all color admixed, whirled in space or solution together; black, certainly, gives the opposite effect. In any case they are colors that can be used with ignorance, or with compassion and aplomb. Aubrey Schwartz has many styles. He began boldly, bold ranges of color, black against white, white so white you can feel the texture of the paper: birds of prey, shrews, rats, chameleons, mandrills, Cabalists, Rabbis, dwarfs, midgets. His early prints have a quality of darkness to them one does not usually find in American art. Against that darkness, the cold impasto of a December solstice (he is a Capricorn), there bursts a kind of summer: but summer restrained, summer refined to its spring or autumnal gasp, a Bergmann summer taken in the privacy of your own island: weeds, endless studies of weeds, briars, stalks, curled fists of past, efflorescent things: a level at which the eye comes alive, the mind supplies the petals, the senses the lost heady odor. Even today can be found on his workbench things that are dry and umbelled, whose secret form or inscape he will in leisure bite into another plate. In middle years the pencil became his tool. He wanted, he says, nothing to interfere with the lyricism, the pure line: the dancer reduced to

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