For 16 years Henry Schwartz (BFA '53) barely spoke. The expressionist painter had been a prodigious Museum School student soon after World War II, then became a faculty member acclaimed for philosophically complex works that blended history with his own life experiences. But following a successful 1990 retrospective exhibition at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, Schwartz sank into a depression so debilitating that he wound up in a retirement home when he was only 65.

Puzzling everyone, he "woke up" last year. "I was listening to Beethoven's 9th Symphony," he says. "I decided, what the hell." At first Schwartz picked up a sketch pad and went back to work, but his body did not keep pace with his recovered mind. Today, at 80, he is bedridden, though a fall has rendered him unable to paint. Yet he cheerfully quotes George Gershwin lyrics and plows through Philip Roth novels and biographies of classical-music composers. "Music is my religion," he declares.

Schwartz's first exhibition in nearly two decades took place last winter—after his awakening—at Boston's Gallery NAGA, which has represented him for close to 30 years. Small in comparison to the retrospective, it featured paintings he made before he was hospitalized; like his earlier work, it showed his fascination with both the horrific and the sublime. He mixed images of World War II concentration camp victims; fleshy, erotically posed female figures; classical-music composers he revered; and the glittery streets of Revere Beach, where he spent his youth. The work was dark, intense, and emotionally fraught.

It bears little resemblance to the jovial man who today signs his letters "affectionately," yet Schwartz's sensibility seems to have taken root at a young age. Born in Revere, Massachusetts, to a Hungarian Jewish father and a Russian Jewish mother, Schwartz was a child when the Great Depression struck his family. "The checks started to bounce," he says; his father grew depressed and left the family for California. Despite years of financial troubles, Schwartz's mother enthusiastically nurtured her son's artistic talent, taking him to children's art classes in Boston from the time he was six. "Her dream was for me to get a job with Walt Disney," Schwartz says.

Instead, he deferred a scholarship to the Museum School to serve in the U.S. Army in Japan. Returning to Boston, Schwartz confidently settled into classes—"I was highly touted as a genius," he says—and into exhibiting and selling his paintings while still an undergraduate. He toured Europe on a Museum School Traveling Scholarship, then signed on to teach.

Still in teaching mode today, Schwartz lies in bed in a room with blank walls, offering advice to young artists. "Things change," he says. "In the face of change, you have to be able to shift gears. If you don't, you'll shear your gifts," he says, pleased with his play on words. Even when the subject turns to his own future, Schwartz is philosophical. "Mahler said his time would come, and it did. Mine will, too. I won't be there to see it, but it will come."