HName: Schwartz, Gary [David]
DateBorn: 1940
Placeborn: Brooklyn, NY
Datedied:
Placedied:
HDescrip: Revisionist, documents-approach scholar to Rembrandt; American art historian who lives and works in the Netherlands. Schwartz's mother was a Hungarian immigrant and his father, of Polish heritage, worked in and later owned the family sweater factory. Schwartz himself grew up in Far Rockaway, NJ. He attended Hebrew grammar schools. At age 16 he entered New York University as a freshman, where a course in art history by H. W. Janson (q.v.) his first year sparked an interest in the subject. He continued to graduate school at Johns Hopkins, studying medieval art history under Adolf Katzenellenbogen (q.v.), the department's chair. In 1965, Schwartz secured a Kress fellowship to study the subject of globes in Dutch still-life painting in the Netherlands. He worked as a researcher for the Bollingen book series. Schwartz fell in love with the Netherlands--and almost immediately with one of its inhabitants, Loekie Hendriks, and never returned to the United States. In 1966, he began working free-lance translating Dutch and German texts and publishing them. Though he gave up pursuing a Ph. D., Schwartz studied under J. G. van Gelder (q.v.) at Utrecht University whose social-history approach to art appealed to him. Together with van Gelder, Schwartz founded the highly respected journal Simiolus in 1966. He joined the staff of the publishing firm Meulenhoff International, Amsterdam, as an editor in 1967. Schwartz's edited works of art history included the English edition of Rembrandt Gemälde by Horst Gerson (q.v.), 1968. The same year he married Hendriks. He also came into contact with the another art historian, J. A. Emmens (q.v.). Emmens was interested in the intellectual judgments that went into the prevailing opinions of an artistic age (Brenson). In 1969, the Rembrandt Research Project was founded at the 300th anniversary of Rembrandt's death (1669). The RRP's thrust was largely connoisseurship, to determine an accurate number of authentic Rembrandts. Van Gelder made a plea to Rembrandt scholars in general in 1970 for a more scholarly reconstruction of Rembrandt's patrons. This was largely ignored in the art history community, except for Schwartz. Schwartz heeded van Gelder's call in a sense; he developed the thesis that Rembrandt's art depended on the tastes of his immediate patrons (Snyder). During this time--and much like the scholar/publisher Walter Strauss (q.v.)--Schwartz founded his own publishing concern to print books he considered important to art history, Uitgeverij Gary Schwartz in Maarssen, the Netherlands, in 1971. Schwartz continued to translate the work of others, for example, his 1976 translation of All the Paintings of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: a Completely Illustrated Catalogue by P. J. J. van Thiel (q.v.). Schwartz's first initiated book on art, the 1977 Rembrandt: All the Etchings Reproduced in True Size, was typical of his publications on art in that it focused on primary sources. His Rembrandt: zijn leven, zijn schilderijen (Rembrandt: his Life, his Paintings), 1984, written in Dutch and published in English the following year, clearly established Schwartz as an serious Rembrandt scholar. The book examined the social history around the time the paintings were created and particularly the patronage history of Rembrandt's work. In 1987 he was a Getty Scholar for the Research Center in Malibu, CA. While there, he was one of 30 scholars called to Boston to discuss the downgrading of Rembrandt paintings by the RRP in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The group, with Schwartz's participation, concluded that there was no consensus on which Rembrandts in those collections were authentic. Schwartz disbanded his publishing firm in 1988, accepting a position as publisher of the Dutch government printing office (later known as the SDU), in The Hague (through 1992). He was both regents lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Harvard Leventritt lecturer for the 1989-1990 academic year. In 1998 he became the director of CODART, the International Council of Curators of Dutch and Flemish Art.
Schwartz's contributions to Dutch art history were exceptional in many ways. Because of the need to expertise, to assign authenticity to Rembrandt works, most work on the artist was based upon connoisseurship and formalist methodologies. Schwartz revised the accepted view of Rembrandt, arguing against the notion that the artist was a humanitarian and an isolated genius. Schwartz's examination of a myriad of documents resulted in a portrait of the artist as a competitive and not particularly well read. Throughout his career, his translations of Dutch texts established him as a primary-source scholar.
HCountry: United States/Netherlands
HBiography: Snyder, James. "Above All, He Pleased his Patrons." Review of Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings. New York Times Book Review March 9, 1986, Section 7: 9-11; Brenson, Michael. "An Idiosyncratic Expert Redraws Rembrandt." New York Times February 28, 1987, p. 15; Liedtke, Walter. "The Study of Dutch Art in America." Artibus et Historiae 21, no. 41 (2000): 216; The Writers' Directory 2007, vol. 2, p. 1679.
HBibliography: Rembrandt: All the Etchings Reproduced in True Size. Maarssen, Netherlands: G. Schwartz, 1977; Rembrandt: zijn leven, zijn schilderijen: een nieuwe biografie met alle beschikbare schilderijen in kleur afgebeeld. Maarssen: Uitgeverij Gary Schwartz, 1984, English, Rembrandt: his Life, his Paintings: a New Biography with all Accessible Paintings Illustrated in Colour. New York: Viking, 1985.