Henry Schwartz; Boston artist and teacher who fought depression; at 81

A 1982 self-portrait by Henry Schwartz included a building bearing composers' names.

Brush in hand, mind roaming freely through the worlds of classical music and philosophy, Henry Schwartz was many men as he stood before a canvas and created paintings that were disturbing, intellectually impish, or both.

"I paint as a conductor, as a Christian, as a corpse," he told the Globe in 1990. "I have a very circumscribed life, but my imagination wanders everywhere."

As he spoke, Mr. Schwartz was in the midst of a triumphant show at Brockton's Fuller Museum of Art, not knowing he also was on the cusp of a bout of depression that would shackle his imagination for more than 15 years, until it was briefly and abruptly set free near the end of his life.

An influential teacher whose work never achieved the fame admirers felt it deserved, Mr. Schwartz spent about 17 years in healthcare facilities before dying Feb. 16 in Evans Park at Newton Corner, an assisted living complex. He was 81 and previously lived for many years in the Back Bay, until the day he put down his brush and called his brother to say he was too paranoid and haunted to keep living alone.

"Henry had the most audacious span of any post-World War II Boston painter," said Arthur Dion, the director of Gallery NAGA on Newbury Street and a friend who went to see Mr. Schwartz regularly, even when the artist could barely tolerate a five-minute visit. "He was a history painter, a satirist, and a diarist who embraced everything from the Holocaust to shtick."

Ensconced in the second generation of an informal group of artists known as the Boston Expressionists, Mr. Schwartz studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and later taught there for many years.

"His classes were spectacular," said Steve Hawley, a painter in Newburyport who studied under Mr. Schwartz. "He used to set up these still lifes - complicated layers of objects he had picked up in antique shops, and photographs, and just crazy, crazy setups. And you were required to paint this."

Classes Mr. Schwartz taught, Dion said, were "a rite of passage for a generation of painters who passed through the Museum School."

The artist's own rite of passage from poverty to galleries was as improbable as his subject matter and the titles he chose for his work. Take "Vienna Blood: Dirty Dancing on the Danube," a 1988 painting that Dion described as depicting "many of his Olympus of composers and philosophers . . . under a sky that seems to be filled with these floating distorted female bodies, who seem to be the muses who gave birth to these heroes."

The youngest of five brothers, Mr. Schwartz grew up in Revere. His father, a jewelry designer left destitute in the Great Depression, essentially abandoned the family to look for work in California. Mr. Schwartz was barely school age and his family was "extremely poor, poor like you can't imagine now," said his niece Paula Apsell of Boston.

Still, his mother scraped together money to send Mr. Schwartz to children's classes each Saturday morning at the MFA, where his talent was apparent. His brother David encouraged Mr. Schwartz to serve in the Army so he could go to college. Using the GI Bill, Mr. Schwartz studied at the Museum School, and spent two years in France and Austria on a fellowship.

By then, eccentricities defined his existence. At nearly 6-foot-5, he found the conventions of life a poor fit. Mr. Schwartz never got a driver's license or flew in a plane; he traveled to Europe by ship. Within several years of returning, he suffered a nervous breakdown and found an apartment on the corner of Garrison and St. Botolph streets in the Back Bay that was home until his health collapsed in the early 1990s.

From his windows he had an eye-level view of the names of favorite composers that were carved into stone near the roof of the Musician's Mutual Relief Society building across St. Botolph Street. When his building went condo, "I felt it was better to buy my apartment than to leave Beethoven and Haydn," he told the Globe in 1982.

An amateur musicologist who stumped all comers with his encompassing knowledge of classical composers, Mr. Schwartz rigged headphones to a transistor radio years before the advent of the Walkman, let alone the iPod. He painted to music, calling it "my religion."

"Bach is the Father, Beethoven is the Son, and Mozart the Holy Ghost," he told the Globe in 1990. "Wagner is the Devil, who, they say, sings the best tune."

His own tune fell silent after the 1990 exhibition was held when he was 62. The depression was so deep that Mr. Schwartz tried electroconvulsive therapy for a dozen years "and he spoke of it as torture," his niece said. "He just didn't metabolize medication, so that didn't help, either."

One day a couple of years ago, the darkness dissipated. No one knows why.

"I walked in and he said, 'Arthur, come in, sit down,' " Dion recalled. "I said, 'What happened to you?' And he said, 'I just decided, what the hell.' "

A year ago, Dion exhibited at Gallery NAGA a series Mr. Schwartz painted just before falling into the depression. As Mr. Schwartz emerged from creative paralysis, he filled pads with pencil drawings, which Dion will show at the gallery on April 13 during a gathering to commemorate Mr. Schwartz's life. Those who wish to attend should contact Gallery NAGA.

Meanwhile, friends say his unexpected return to creativity, and the attention it drew in Boston's art world, invites a long overdue reappraisal of Mr. Schwartz's work.

"In a sense, the work he did was about his life," Hawley said. "Each work was almost a biography, there were so many pieces and parts that reflected things that were going on in his head. And I don't think he was ever appreciated for his greatness. As far as I was concerned, he was one of the greatest colorists - a natural."

Newcomers to the paintings and drawings will find that Mr. Schwartz "took the history of the world and the progress of culture personally," Dion said.

"My intention," Mr. Schwartz wrote in 1982, "is to evoke painterly meditations on the unspeakable and unthinkable; to murder back into life, in the waning years of our century, a small measure of meaning in the search for an individual life on the way to an individual death."