This column first appeared in September 2010.
In a 1927 interview, acclaimed Austrian born water color artist John Zwara said: “We are indebted to nature for everything we have and we should love and enjoy her beauty. People have eyes and see not. They hurry by the most wonderful pictures, the natural beauty of streams, forests and fields.” A deeply profound statement made by a complicated, mysterious man with interesting ties to Indianapolis.
Zwara came to Indianapolis sometime around 1933 during the darkest days of the Great Depression when banks were failing at such a rapid pace that newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a “March bank holiday” by freezing the assets of insolvent banks in order to reorganize and reopen them to make them strong enough to survive under the Emergency Banking Relief Act. In a time of bread lines, soup kitchens and strangers sleeping on every street corner, John Zwara may well have been the strangest stranger of them all.
During his time in our Capitol City, Zwara was a vagabond who spent several years living on the streets, selling his artwork for a song and using the proceeds to buy more art supplies. A famous central city resident and eccentric in his own right , Alexander Vonnegut befriended Zwara. Vonnegut recognized that his friend needed psychiatric help and arranged for him to be committed to Central State Hospital in 1938. There he was diagnosed with dementia praecox (schizophrenia). Zwara spent six months at the hospital before his “escape” from the mental health facility.
A large part of Zwara’s appeal to art historians is that, although lacking in common social skills and often unable to participate in interpersonal conversation, he spoke loudly through the beauty of his artwork.
Born Jan Zwara to parents Joseph and Mary Zwara on December 27, 1880, in Horni Stepanov, Hungary (now a part of the Czech Republic), he changed his name to John upon entering the U.S. His formal education consisted of three years of grammar school and four years of high school. His father, a wealthy businessman, was able to provide his son with four years of artistic training; one year at the Academy of Fine Art in Prague and three more years in Poland at the Warsaw Academy of Art. Art historians have long speculated that Zwara received more art study in Berlin, Germany and Hungary but any such records were lost during the chaos of World War II.
Like fellow tortured artist Vincent Van Gogh, Zwara took advantage of a stable brother who set John up with his own studio in Chicago. Coming to America around the age of 24, the artist soon surrendered to the wanderlust that would haunt him for the rest of his life. During conventional business hours when the studio was open John would most often be gone sketching when he should have been schmoozing clients for commission work and selling his paintings. The studio was a failure and for the next eighteen years Zwara painted as he wandered.
In 1928, Omaha World-Herald reporter Bobbie O’Dare published a revealing article in praise of the artists’ works that also described how he lived and worked. The article, buoyed by Zwara’s rambling personal journal writings, traced the artist’s rough travels through Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Wisconsin on to Ohio, Montana, Nevada and San Bernadino then to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Salt Lake City and Denver. During these itinerant wanderings, Zwara worked at menial jobs in mines, smelters, lumber camps, on the railroad and even digging ditches, while living in seedy hotels, flop houses and tent cities alongside railyard hoboes. While these employments varied from several days to several months, Zwara did spend a six year stint building the Los Angeles aqueduct. It was not all hard labor though as one of these jobs in Chicago found the artist spending several weeks modeling, in his words, “For the ladies sculpture class.” No doubt accepting much needed art supplies as a supplement to the meager sitting fees.
Zwara once commented on his rambling ways by saying, “I get tired. I go.” Explaining one job for a California cattle king, he commented: “I paint his house. I paint him pictures of his ranch till his house is full of them. He tell me to go out and paint the barn. I go, but not to paint that barn.” While in Salt Lake City spray painting locomotives, Zwara entered an art contest sponsored by his railroad employer, Zwara remarked, “I put in my paintings. I got First prize and at night the big building burn down, the paintings burn up.”
Arriving in Omaha in 1922, the artist was befriended by Acorn Press publisher Albert J. Samuelson who purchased some of Zwara’s work and helped the eccentric artist sell others. In 1927 he entered four landscapes in the “Exhibition of Nebraska Artists” where one of his works was the first to be sold. Marion Reed, art supervisor for the Omaha schools, declared Zwara a genius and a short time later an exhibit of his work was held where 19 of his 22 paintings sold. By most standards, Zwara could finally claim success, but soon his health began to fail.
Years of living rough on the road and his bad eating habits had taken a toll, physically and mentally, and Zwara’s grasp on reality quickly led to a disregard of his personal hygiene and his increased antisocial behavior. The artist was living in Omaha as late as 1931, but by the time Zwara resurfaced in Indiana, the people of Omaha would not have recognized him. The artist passed through Utah long enough to enter his work in the annual exhibit at the Salt Lake City Museum, winning second prize in 1932. Judging by the dates on his Indiana landscape watercolors he arrived in the Hoosier state in 1933. Even though Zwara continued his wandering ways, Indianapolis became his home base and for the remainder of his life. As with many Hoosier artists, Nashville and Brown County became his subject of choice.
Zwara sold some of his Indiana paintings through the H. Lieber Company, a major art supply house in the Capitol city that also bought and sold artwork. The company also gave him studio space. Decades later in 1976, Zwara acquaintance Kurt Lieber stated, “He had a fine talent and didn’t seem to give a damn about money. When we started, we gave him a dollar per painting and sold them for five. We framed them and made a little on the frames.” Lieber recalled the varied subjects of Zwara’s work as: “Zwara had no favorite subjects – if it would sell he painted it. He went to Brown County for the Lieber firm and brought back a sizable portfolio.”
It was here in 1934 that John first met, and befriended, Alex Vonnegut who asked to meet the artist after seeing his work on display in the windows of the arthouse. Vonnegut was the uncle of legendary novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who once described him as “My late Uncle Alex Vonnegut, my father’s kid brother, a Harvard-educated life insurance agent in Indianapolis who was well read and wise, was a humanist like all the rest of the family. What Uncle Alex found particularly objectionable about human beings in general was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy.” Vonnegut was a co-founder of the Indianapolis Chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous who was known to walk around with rocks in his pockets to keep himself from blowing away on windy Indianapolis days.
By the time the two men met, Zwara’s fall into schizophrenia was a full blown illness. Vonnegut was shocked to learn that the artist slept in the streets and lived on a Spartan diet of bread and coffee. Vonnegut recalled Zwara at their first meeting as “a lone man. His glasses were terribly messed up with dirt and with scratches…his hair was terribly messed up.” In the spring of 1938 Vonnegut, in an attempt to help his troubled friend, had Zwara admitted to Central State Hospital. In a letter to the institution he stated: “During the last months he has become a financial burden on those who tried to help him to eke out a livelihood. He is hopelessly inarticulate in his speech, but a consummate master with his brushes and watercolors.” On Zwara’s admission papers he added the following: “since I have known the patient, he has been almighty queer; incapable of handling money. Language is one of his great difficulties; (he) has apparently forgotten his native tongue and can give an account of himself only incoherently. He lives in a world far removed from the one which most people recognize.”
Zwara remained at Central State for six months of much needed relaxation, relief and painting, producing numerous watercolor studies of the grounds. Then he simply walked away and returned to the vagabond life he knew best. Little is known of the artists’ life in the 1940s other than that he continued to sketch and paint. Zwara covertly arranged for his work to be exhibited at the yearly Hoosier Salon art shows in 1943, 1944 and 1945.
Toward the end of his life the artist was taken in by The Little Sisters of the Poor located at 500 East Vermont St. in Indianapolis. It was there on May 4, 1951, the Zwara died of a heart attack without a penny to his name. Alex Vonnegut later commented: “I was asked by friends, who thought Zwara was a very strange person, why I respected the man. Because he could paint.”
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.