Dana Schutz, the American painter who gained international attention following controversy over her depiction of lynching victim Emmett Till, continues to create provocative and powerful works from her Brooklyn studio near Sunset Industrial Park. The 49-year-old artist, who describes herself as someone who "lives in color," has spent decades challenging conventional boundaries in contemporary painting while navigating the complex intersection of art, identity, and social responsibility.
According to current painting theory, viewers who lose themselves in a work's composition, colors, and emotional impact while forgetting the world around them have fallen into the "modernist trap." This approach allegedly ignores the socio-cultural and economic contexts that brought the painting into existence and onto museum, gallery, or private collection walls. However, Schutz's work demonstrates that one quality of great painting lies precisely in its ability to make viewers forget all the discourse surrounding it, at least for a moment.
Schutz began developing this powerful visual language during her studies at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio, when painting was decidedly unfashionable. "Painting wasn't popular at all back then," she recalls during a recent studio visit. "The focus was on completely different things. In the early 2000s, the death of the genre was proclaimed once again, and conceptual approaches found more favor, or strictly geometric painting."
Even as a graduate student, Schutz brought provocative and obscure imagery from her imagination onto canvas. In 2000, she painted a girl with a tortured expression wearing a T-shirt that certainly wouldn't sell commercially: the word "Daughter" printed beneath the spread thighs and exposed genitals from Gustave Courbet's scandalous 1866 painting "L'Origine du monde." She created this work as a reaction to the trend of parents printing cute sayings on their children's shirts.
Equally disturbing are Schutz's "Face-Eater" paintings, featuring caricatured faces consuming themselves. New York critic Barry Schwabsky recognized these as metaphors for artistic autonomy that feeds on itself. Schutz's explanation is simpler and entirely that of a painter: she paints what she wants to see. "In this painting, I literally wanted to imagine how it would work and what it would look like: eating your own face. A terrible thought."
While creating these works, she thought about Georg Baselitz's "Die große Nacht im Eimer" from 1963, the painting from Cologne's Museum Ludwig with its creepy figure and monstrous phallus, as well as the dark spaces in Rembrandt and Goya paintings. The grim contemporary reality during the American Iraq War, launched by George W. Bush's administration, likely influenced these works as well.
Another notable series features girls sneezing violently while looking distinctly unflattering. The adolescents in these works, on which Schutz unleashed her full passion for painting early in her career, were imagined and fictional, shown in an all-too-human moment of losing control. The greenish-yellow snot escaping from a bulky, almost exploding nose in the painting "Sneeze" represents pure abstract expressionist gesture, masterfully painted like the somewhat greasy hair strands. The girl sneezes color, becoming a plea for pure painting. The red sweater and blue background complete the complementary color palette.
While no direct precedent exists for this body of work, Schutz notes her love for Picasso's weeping women. It may have been her characteristic bravura that fueled the uproar over her painting "Open Casket" several years ago. Schutz had painted Black lynching victim Emmett Till in his coffin with his disfigured face, after the fourteen-year-old boy was brutally murdered by white men in Mississippi in 1955.
The painting, which had not caused major controversy in a 2016 exhibition at Berlin's Contemporary Fine Arts gallery, was scandalously received at the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York and unintentionally became an epochal work. The question "Who is allowed to paint what in whose name?" was debated more relentlessly around this work than any other contemporary piece. When speaking with a group of German students in her studio, Schutz doesn't avoid the topic, though understandably she doesn't want to fuel the debate further, especially with statements that could become headlines. She offers neither blame nor admission, simply stating that she sees the contexts more clearly today and was grateful then to retreat into her studio during the storm of debate to continue painting.
Her studio resembles a painter's paradise. Wide rolling shelves are scattered with squeezed paint tubes, and catalogs lie in heaps: Joan Mitchell, Martin Kippenberger and Lee Krasner, Pablo Picasso, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and the "Berlin Art 1961-1987" exhibition catalog from the Museum of Modern Art. There's also a rolling mirror, sometimes used in studios to view work in reverse, making it easier to spot gaps, weaknesses, and compositional questions, as British painter David Hockney has written extensively about.
Schutz sketches her figures in rough outlines with charcoal on the brown paper covering delivered canvases, though these massive compositional sketches barely hint at what will emerge. Large paintings stand on paint buckets against tall walls, ready for evaluation before their October exhibition at a London gallery. These works confirm her tendency toward metaphor and allegory, which isn't new in Schutz's oeuvre.
When a crowd of people is wedged together in chaos against a backdrop of collapsing skyscrapers, it can be understood as commentary on American society. Schutz depicted these antagonisms twenty years ago when she showed various fanatics confronting each other—a painting interpreted in her acclaimed exhibition at Paris's Musée d'Art Moderne last year as a premonition of the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Other recent works show a giant lobster attacking a woman on a beach, while a dinner party that could have been inspired by a George Grosz painting from the New Objectivity movement becomes the occasion for a delicate still life with grapes and meat. In other works, she rarely misses an opportunity to express her admiration for Philip Guston's simple monumentality. Simultaneously, Schutz insists on the subjectivity of her perception and a peculiar storytelling within her own pictorial world.
Modernist trap or not, all these paintings represent ingenious statements about painting's options and qualities through their bold brushstrokes, rich color application, saturated contrasts, and frequently powerful reds, with space-creating chiaroscuro effects. Schutz's painting has become more classical, more old-masterish, and even more lush in recent years. "I live in color," she states as her credo: "I am a painter that's in the paint."
