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.