May 11, 2006

Barbara Schwartz, 58, Painter of Abstract Forms, Dies

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Barbara Schwartz, an artist whose painted plaster reliefs were tangentially associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement in New York in the late 1970's, died on Monday in Manhattan, where she lived. She was 58.

The cause was leukemia that developed from chemotherapy for ovarian cancer 12 years ago, said her companion, Richard Johnson.

Ms. Schwartz was born in Philadelphia and received her B.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University. After moving to New York, Ms. Schwartz had her first solo show at the Willard Gallery on East 72nd Street in Manhattan in 1975 and was subsequently represented by Hirschl & Adler Modern and then the Andre Zarre Gallery, where her most recent exhibition took place earlier this year. She was in the 1979 Whitney Biennial.

In the late 1970's Ms. Schwartz was one of several artists who sought to vitalize abstract painting by making it more dimensional and also linking it to non-Western decorative traditions. Her works balanced organic and geometric forms and sometimes reflected an Islamic influence. In the 1990's she began to make some of her pieces from glazed ceramic.

Ms. Schwartz had taught at the School of Visual Arts since 1978. Her work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the New York Public Library.

Ms. Schwartz's marriages, to Bill Jensen and Art Schade, both artists, ended in divorce. In addition to Mr. Johnson, she is survived by her step-daughter, Megan Schade, of Brooklyn.