«Fioretti»
Paul Schwartz

from 16 June

Paul Schwartz
«Fioretti»

The exhibition «Fioretti by Paul Schwartz» opened on June 16 in the Odesa Fine Arts museum. It presents about 65 works by Odesa artist with German roots Paul Schwartz, mostly from 1900-1920.

Today, the name of Paul Schwartz (1873-1934) is almost forgotten: the personal exhibition «Fioretti» is designed to remind of him and give a second life to the creative heritage of the artist.

The title of the exhibition «Fioretti» is a reference to the work of the XIV century «Flowers of Francis of Assisi». This is a collection of 53 short chapters that tell about the life of St. Francis of Assisi and vividly depict the miracles he created.

Similarly, in our exhibition, each work is a small separate story about the miracle and beauty of life. Every object, every flower in the artist's works has a character and its history. Like a dream catcher, Schwartz hunts for images: in the spots of monotypes, drawings of stones, cracks, and blots - there are essences and feelings everywhere.

Paul Schwartz

The subtle, artificially invented language of Art Nouveau, absorbed by the artist in Paris at the beginning of the century, is woven into the fabric of the artistic life of Odesa in the 1910s. In the artistic images of his theatrical scenery, grotesques, and oriental compositions, the boundary between the subtle and dense worlds becomes palpable. Paul Schwartz's watercolors are full of escapism: the artist seems to be trying to take the viewer with him into a fairy-tale world without worries, anxieties, and disappointments, not at all like the stormy reality of the 1920s.

In his work, Paul Schwartz was able to germinate the seeds of this unique period and preserve them when the Ukrainian artistic environment was artificially torn out of the European context. Therefore, today we have the opportunity to see a rare example of half-forgotten Odesa modernism.