Native New York artist Daniel Bennett Schwartz has been creating his view of contemporary life through traditional realism for over half a century. He began this journey at the Little Red School House in Greenwich Village where at the age of eight, he attended Saturday afternoon art classes. After graduating from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, he studied with Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Art Students League, and in 1949, he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has taught at the Parsons School of Design and has conducted a private workshop in painting for forty years.
As an artist-reporter, Schwartz met and drew the personalities of "The New Wave" cinema in Paris; he lived with and chronicled the life of Mississippi river pilots; he witnessed and documented the My Lai massacre trial for Life; he created a bronze sculpture for the National Football League that has been awarded annually for the past 38 years; he joined a cast of actors to document the making of a TV drama for CBS. Schwartz created original artwork for Genocide, an Oscar-winning film documentary. In 1980 he was sent to Southeast Asia as Artist-in-Residence for the Mobil Corporation, bringing back 100 drawings and watercolors. In the following year he was commissioned to create a series of bus stop posters for the acclaimed PBS series, Masterpiece Theater.
Among his awards and honors, Schwartz received a 1959 and 1960 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, a number of prizes from the National Academy of Design, and the 1964 Purchase Prize from the Childe Hassam Fund of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
