Schweitzer melds art with philanthropy

In April, the fifth anniversary of the John A. Schweitzer Gallery, inaugurated in 2004 in his honour at the University of Western Ontario, was marked by the exhibition Schweitzer’s Universe De-constructed. Two months later he was back in London for the unveiling of his commissioned diptych “Line of Beauty” for the newly-opened Paul Davenport Theatre on the university campus.

This former Westmount resident, whose lithe youthfulness belies his 56 years, now writes his own curriculum as a visiting professor at the School of Architecture at McGill University, where he teaches a graduate seminar on contemporary art theory and criticism.

Last November, Schweitzer curated his own comparative exhibition, Acute Liaisons (Liaisons aigues), at McGill. On the occasion of the centenary of collage in 2008, he juxtaposed eight of his own collages, one from each series, with eight works from his private collection of American and European artists including Beuys, Caro, Mitchell, and Motherwell, among others — all of whom have influenced his artistic style as either friends or mentors.

As a stalwart apologist of both visual and verbal literacy, Schweitzer, the artist and wordsmith, integrates found objects with textual references into his preferred medium of collage, thereby subverting the modernist canon. In studios located in Montreal, New York and London (England) Schweitzer houses boxes filled with interesting and provocative ephemera, together with clippings of text from print media gathered and filed, to be melded into a future work.

Just as author Ken Follett can be inspired by a three-inch newspaper account to write a suspenseful novel, Schweitzer can be inspired to create a work, or a series of works, by a shard of literary text. The result is, to date, eight award-winning series exhibited internationally, and always accompanied by critical publications penned by notable art critics and historians, architects, as well as literary luminaries such as Margaret Atwood. These elegant catalogues, in and of themselves, are like family albums — the only living legacies of the exhibitions, other than the works themselves.

Schweitzer has made the life-defining decision to stay in a more tranquil time before internet technology, emails, websites, blackberries, texting and twittering, in order to carve out his own cherished studio time.

In view of his insistence that his work is a “vocation”, not a career, this self-avowed “Neo-luddite” is reachable only by phone or snail mail, coveting, as he does, those envelopes as collage material. For Schweitzer, that conscious choice to remain locked in the mid-twentieth century is reflected in his thematic fixation on the currency of time. Nine years ago, the Visual Arts Centre organized a retrospective exhibition “The Shapes of Time”. That exhibition became what he calls “the ‘madeleine incident’ that allows us to collaborate today.” In other words, in Proustian terms, the event triggers memories and insights that unravel this contemporary narrative and discourse.

Ironically, that contentious work Schweitzer created in high school that broke protocol, an abstract image of a cob of corn, became the first work he sold. Following his graduate studies at Toronto’s York University (MFA, 1978) and extensive global travel, Schweitzer has, nevertheless, always remembered his formative roots in southwestern Ontario. He is committed to giving back with generous philanthropy to his undergraduate alma mater, the University of Western Ontario. For more than two decades, Schweitzer has made significant donations of Canadian art (Comtois, Craven, and Curnoe) and international art including Henry Moore sculptures, together with contributions of rare books and archival documents that now form the John A Schweitzer Fonds, making Western the pre-eminent study centre of the artist’s life and work.

Furthermore, this $2 million gift represents only one of many, to institutions in the fields of culture, education and medicine that are recipients of his largesse, totaling in excess of $10 million. With his strong sense of civic duty, he has also been recognized nationally for his activism in the causes of architectural conservation, AIDS awareness and literacy.

By popular demand the exhibition, Schweitzer’s Universe De-constructed has been extended through the end of October at UWO. For more information phone 519-661-4041, or go to www.lib.uwo.ca/archives/ .