About Fight in An Elevator 4 – The Featured Image on this Blog Post
The artwork “Fight in An Elevator 4,” created by the artist Dana Schutz in 2016, is a striking example of Neo-Expressionism and falls within the figurative genre. This piece vividly captures a frantic and chaotic scene, reflecting the hallmarks of the Neo-Expressionism movement through its bold, dynamic composition and emotionally charged subject matter.
In the artwork, there is a whirlwind of distorted figures and vibrant colors, contributing to a sense of turbulence and disarray. The figures appear entangled and contorted in a confined space, suggesting aggressive physical interaction, likely alluding to the titular fight in an elevator. The use of exaggerated forms, sharp angles, and fragmented body parts emphasizes movement and intensity, typical of Schutz’s style. Additionally, the color palette is diverse, with prominent hues of red, blue, and earthy tones colliding to enhance the sense of conflict and unrest. The brushstrokes are vigorous and expressive, further enhancing the vivid and tumultuous atmosphere of the scene depicted in the artwork.
If Pablo Picasso cracked the world of painting wide open, Dana Schutz lives in the aftermath, picking through the fragments with sharp wit and fearless brushwork. While her work stands firmly in the contemporary moment—laced with irony, grotesque humor, and cultural anxiety—it carries the unmistakable DNA of Picasso’s revolutionary approach to form, narrative, and the human figure.
Picasso didn’t just distort reality—he redefined it. Schutz has inherited that permission. But she isn’t imitating. She’s mutating what she’s inherited, dragging it through 21st-century chaos and giving it teeth.
Picasso’s Influence: A Foundation of Freedom
Picasso gave artists a new license: to reject realism, to fracture anatomy, and to paint the impossible. Schutz seizes this freedom with urgency. Her figures—twisted, screaming, often caught mid-metamorphosis—aren’t meant to resemble real people. They’re containers for psychological strain, absurdity, violence, or existential dread. Think of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon—its sharp, mask-like faces and angular limbs—and you can see its shadow in Schutz’s bulging eyes, grotesque mouths, and tangled bodies.
But while Picasso fractured form to explore perception and space, Schutz fractures it to expose emotion, contradiction, and mental rupture. In Schutz’s world, people eat themselves (Self-Eater, 2004), give birth to their own heads, or unravel in painterly explosions. The body is a site of crisis, transformation, and uncomfortable truths—just like it was in Picasso’s most radical periods.
Invented Narratives and Imagined Subjects
One of Picasso’s great innovations was the use of symbolic or imaginary figures as vehicles for meaning—think of the Minotaur, the harlequin, or the weeping woman. Schutz extends that tradition. In her early series “Frank from Observation,” she invented a fictional man named Frank—then painted his life obsessively as if he were a real sitter. It’s absurd, darkly funny, and deeply introspective. Picasso would have recognized this: the invented subject used as a mirror for the artist’s own psyche.
This impulse continues in Schutz’s narrative paintings. She paints scenes that don’t exist, and couldn’t: fantastical, grotesque, surreal moments that feel both mythic and modern. She uses fiction the way Picasso did—not to escape reality, but to get at deeper psychological or political truths.
Brushwork, Color, and Material Power
Schutz paints with physical force. Her brushwork is loose, aggressive, and full of movement. She loads paint onto the canvas in thick, animated strokes that seem barely able to contain the chaos of the figures within them. This gestural energy echoes the expressive materiality of late Picasso, especially his emotionally charged portraits and mythological scenes.
Color, too, plays a central role in her connection to Picasso. Schutz’s palette is often jarring, unnatural, and emotionally coded. Her use of bold, clashing hues—acid greens, sickly pinks, bruise-like blues—adds to the psychological dissonance. It’s not about harmony; it’s about intensity.
Humor and Horror: Walking the Line
Picasso often used visual humor—distorted faces, caricature, erotic exaggeration—to create tension and satire. Schutz pushes this grotesque humor even further. Her paintings often make you laugh and recoil at the same time. They’re filled with absurd scenarios and monstrous figures that mirror the contradictions of human behavior. The result is both funny and deeply unsettling—a visual equivalent of black comedy.
In this, Schutz echoes the Picasso who mocked, ridiculed, and amplified. But where Picasso was often driven by myth and classical form, Schutz is plugged into cultural absurdity, body horror, and psychological collapse.
Confronting History and Violence
Schutz, like Picasso, is no stranger to controversy—and like Picasso, she doesn’t flinch from using art to confront trauma, history, and moral complexity.
Picasso’s Guernica (1937) stands as one of the most powerful anti-war statements in modern art. He didn’t depict violence literally; he rendered it symbolically—fractured horses, screaming mothers, and dismembered bodies to express collective agony. Schutz operates in that same tradition of emotional compression and symbolic intensity.
Her 2016 painting Open Casket (above), which depicted the mutilated body of Emmett Till based on postmortem photographs, stirred immense controversy and debate. Many criticized her for painting Black pain as a white artist. Others defended the work as a gut-wrenching attempt to grapple with history. Either way, it was unmistakably Picasso-esque: confronting horror not through realism, but through distortion, metaphor, and raw emotion. Her artwork echoes Picasso’s Guernica when he reacted to the bombing of the Spanish town by the same name. This artwork has become an icon of anti-war sentiment.
Why is Emmet Till significant?
Emmett Till was a 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago who became a tragic symbol of racial violence in the United States after his brutal murder in Mississippi in 1955.
What Happened:
In August 1955, Till was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi. While there, he allegedly whistled at or flirted with a white woman named Carolyn Bryant, though the exact nature of the interaction remains unclear—and Bryant later admitted she had lied about parts of her accusation.
A few days later, Roy Bryant (Carolyn’s husband) and J.W. Milam (his half-brother) kidnapped Emmett from his great-uncle’s home. They beat him, mutilated him, shot him in the head, and threw his body into the Tallahatchie River, weighing it down with a 75-pound cotton gin fan.
Why It Mattered:
Till’s body was recovered three days later. It was so badly disfigured that he could only be identified by a ring on his finger.
His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, made the courageous decision to hold an open-casket funeral in Chicago and allowed Jet magazine and other Black press outlets to photograph the body. The shocking images galvanized public outrage and helped spark the modern Civil Rights Movement.
The Aftermath:
Bryant and Milam were tried for Till’s murder but were acquitted by an all-white jury. Protected by double jeopardy laws, they later admitted to the killing in a paid interview with Look magazine.
The injustice of Emmett Till’s murder and trial exposed the depth of racism in the American South and became a catalyst for activism. Rosa Parks would later say that when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus later that year, she was thinking of Emmett Till.
Legacy:
His life and death continue to resonate through art, music, literature, and activism—serving as a searing reminder of the cost of racial injustice.
Emmett Till’s story is now taught as a pivotal moment in American history.
The Emmett Till Antilynching Act was signed into U.S. law in 2022, making lynching a federal hate crime.
Like Guernica, Open Casket asked a volatile question: can painting still speak to atrocity? And what are the limits—or responsibilities—of an artist when doing so?
Dana Schutz: A Contemporary Heir
Dana Schutz is not Picasso’s disciple. She’s a contemporary heir in the truest sense—someone who’s absorbed his language of destruction and reinvention and reshaped it for our time. Where Picasso fragmented to liberate perception, Schutz fragments to reveal inner turmoil, cultural absurdity, and psychic rupture. She’s part of the tradition he started, but she’s speaking in her own dialect—louder, messier, more emotionally exposed.
Her figures scream louder than his. Her world is more unhinged. But the DNA of radical invention—the core belief that art should disturb, distort, and reinvent reality—is the same.
Conclusion: In the House That Picasso Built
Picasso didn’t leave behind a style. He left behind a challenge: break the rules, then break them again. Dana Schutz lives by that challenge. Her work is aggressive, strange, often uncomfortable—but never safe. Like Picasso, she believes painting is a living, dangerous act. She’s not just following in his footsteps—she’s stomping through the house he built, tearing down walls, and adding on new, surreal, grotesque rooms.
Picasso taught us that to paint the truth, you sometimes have to lie. Schutz shows us that to paint the now, you sometimes have to scream.