Carlos Schwabe Biography

Carlos Schwabe, born Émile Martin Charles Schwabe (1866-1926), was a Swiss Symbolist painter and printmaker.

Schwabe was born in Altona, Holstein, into a merchant family. In 1870 his family moved to Switzerland, receiving Swiss citizenship in 1888. Between the years of 1882 and 1884, he studied at the École des arts industriels.

After studying art in Geneva, he relocated to Paris as a young man, where he worked as a wallpaper designer, and he became acquainted with Symbolist artists, musicians (Guillaume Lekeu, Vincent d'Indy), and writers. In 1892, he was one of the painters of the famous Salon de la Rose + Croix organized by Joséphin Péladan at the Galerie Durand-Ruel. His poster for the first Salon is an important symbolic work of idealist new art. He exhibited at the Société nationale des Beaux-Arts and the Salon d'automne, and was present at the Exposition Universelle of 1900, receiving the Gold medal. In the years that followed, his work was also shown in Munich, Zürich, Vienna, and Brussels. Schwabe received the French Légion of Honor in 1902.

Schwabe's paintings typically featured mythological and allegorical themes, with a very personal, idealistic vision and a social interest. References to the artists Albrecht Dürer and Andrea Mantegna can be seen in Schwabe's work.

Schwabe is known for being one of the most important symbolist book illustrators. He illustrated the novel Le Rêve (1892) by Émile Zola, Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (1900), Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), and Albert Samain's Jardin de l'infante (1908), but also texts by Haraucourt, Mallarmé, Blondel, Mendès, Lamennais, etc. His important work La Vague (The Wave) and its preparatory drawings are a testimony of the engagement of the artist during the Dreyfus affair.

The most important works by Schwabe belong to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in Geneva, the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, and private collections.

Two distinct styles are recognised in Schwabe's art. Before 1900, Schwabe's paintings were more individual and experimental, indicating the idealism of the Symbolists; conventional, allegorical scenes from nature became more prominent in his later work. Images of women were important, sometimes representing death and suffering, other times creativity and guidance. His first wife was his model for angels and virgins, and "Death" in Death and the Grave Digger (1895) resembles her. The death of a close friend in 1894, the musician Guillaume Lekeu, when Schwabe was 28 years old, engendered his interest in representing death and the world of ideal creation.

Schwabe lived in France for the rest of his life and died in Avon, Seine-et-Marne, in 1926.