Person
Biography
Sol Schwartz was an artist who sketched live performances, leading to a 2011 Norman Rockwell Museum exhibit entitled “Drawing in the Dark” with a large selection of Pillow images. He died in his New York apartment on Christmas Day 2015 at age 84, four years after the death of his second wife, philanthropist Elayne Bernstein. Schwartz began drawing in his father's hand laundry on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, using shirt cardboards as sketch pads. He attended the High School of Music and Art and then studied at Brooklyn College, where his classmates included Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Ad Reinhardt. After college, he gave up art for 35 years as a music teacher, general contractor, and director of a career counseling service. He eventually retired to the Berkshires where, he wrote, "I could be close to the music, theater and art that I love." He explained that his performance drawings evolved by accident. “I used to make little sketches in the corners of my programs when I attended concerts,” he wrote, and he soon began bringing a sketchpad with him to the theater. His Pillow subjects included Mikhail Baryshnikov, Katherine Dunham, Savion Glover, Bill T. Jones, Nacho Duato, Rennie Harris, Paul Taylor, and Mark Morris. In the catalog for “Drawing in the Dark,” he described his experiences sketching at the Pillow: “Dancers don’t sit still. They are usually flying through the air and it is a trick to try and catch them in motion…I simply look at the dancers and let my hand go.” Schwartz’s work lives on in four books.