You Want It Darker
Peri Schwartz is known primarily for her lushly rendered still life paintings and prints; she infuses this traditional genre with a vitality, pushing the representational elements into the realm of abstraction. You Want it Darker is part of the Bottles and Jars series she began in 2010. In these works, Schwartz creates carefully constructed arrangements in her studio of bottles and jars of different sizes filled with liquids in various colors and tones. She adjusts the components until she finds the right balance between transparecy and opacity, color and non-color, and solid and void. Although she works from a three-dimensional arrangement, she flattens the forms so that they resemble the grid she uses to aid in her depiction of the scene. Despite the title, the bottles and jars are just a pretext for Schwartz to examine her true subject: that of the influence of natural and reflected light and the effect it has on the shimmering bottles and their contents. The squared shape of the bottles, each with flat black lids, create a kind of sameness so that they essentially disappear into an abstract pattern recalling early modernist grids and allow the various hues of the inks--in this case, exclusively grey or black--to dominate the composition.
Artwork Details
- Title: You Want It Darker
- Artist: Peri Schwartz (American, Brooklyn, New York, 1951–2021 White Plains, New York)
- Printer: Gregory Burnet
- Date: 2018
- Medium: Spit bite etching with drypoint
- Dimensions: Plate: 17 1/2 × 21 in. (44.5 × 53.3 cm)
Sheet: 25 in. × 26 3/4 in. (63.5 × 67.9 cm) - Classification: Prints
- Credit Line: Gift of the artist, 2019
- Object Number: 2019.210
- Curatorial Department: Drawings and Prints
More Artwork
A slider containing 5 items.
Press the down key to skip to the last item.
Press the down key to skip to the last item.
Multiple artists/makers
2015
Louise Bourgeois
1947
Kara Walker
Gregory Burnet
2017
Multiple artists/makers
2002–05
Multiple artists/makers
1983
Research Resources
The Met provides unparalleled resources for research and welcomes an international community of students and scholars. The Met's Open Access API is where creators and researchers can connect to the The Met collection. Open Access data and public domain images are available for unrestricted commercial and noncommercial use without permission or fee.
To request images under copyright and other restrictions, please use this Image Request form.
Feedback
We continue to research and examine historical and cultural context for objects in The Met collection. If you have comments or questions about this object record, please complete and submit this form. The Museum looks forward to receiving your comments.