Barbara Schwartz at St. Peter's Church

Tucked into the northwest corner of the Citibank Building at 54th and Lexington Ave., St. Peter's Church has long had an ongoing program of displaying serious contemporary art in its lobby and hallways, and artists have responded by taking their work in surprising directions, often intensifying what had been a Symbolist streak in their work into outright ecclesiastical content. Barbara Schwartz performed just such a turn in a recent exhibition there. Her wall sculptures and works on paper have always reflected a debt to the early American modernism of Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley tightened up into planar fragments that unite Symbolist imagery with the abstracting, geometric cut-and-paste of Synthetic Cubism. Each compositional element in her earlier work was imbued with a strong local color. The painterly address of these pieces foreshadowed an even flatter material plane for her imagery--so much so that by now it seems impossible to consider her work as anything other than painting with sculptural collage elements, rather than painterly sculpture.

For this show Schwartz chose the Stations of the Cross as her theme. Collectively titled "Totems," the series played out over 14 eccentrically shaped panels across which are distributed interlocking planes of wood painted in black and white. In a statement for a recent show in Italy, Schwartz wrote that since the Sept. 11 tragedy she has largely limited her palette to black and white, so that color has receded in favor of the starkest possible contrast. It seems appropriate to extend this chromatic decision to the Stations, since the journey they demarcate, a grueling test of the body, compassionate will and faith, is itself a stark one. She doesn't suggest that it was any ideological motivation that decreed the discipline of black and white, rather that it was more the product of an ongoing internal debate, with esthetic intuition trumping moral certainty. It's easy to understand why, after the events of the last three years, an artist might feel that she has no color left in her for the time being.

The "Totems" range from fullto half-figure scale. Several, especially the larger ones, are shaped like crosses or vestment robes. The black-and-white patterns suggest heraldic symbolism, Vorticist explosions and the imagery and interpenetrating spaces of Inuit designs. Schwartz is drawing here on the rich interplay between modernist painting and the geometric symbolism of folk practice and more historically remote cultures. One thinks most readily of the so-called Indian Space painters and of Hartley's abstractions from Native American designs. The relationship of Schwartz's work to icons is underscored by the extreme planarity of her designs and their folding into cruciformality. Both the black and white areas describe shapes that we recognize from cultural experience, but which also represent the movement of physical and psychic energies: the "explosion" at the center of one the larger "Totems," for instance, could just as easily be rays of light shooting from the Sacred Heart.

Schwartz is a wonderful colorist, but her current chromatic restriction serves her well in this work, giving an unsentimental graphic clarity to what might otherwise have been overly complex compositional juxtapositions. The "Totems" looked very fine in the lobby of the church, and I have a hunch they would have no trouble consecrating the "white cube" of a gallery space as well.

--Stephen Westfall

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