A photograph of 14-year-old Emmett Till’s mutilated face snapped during his open-casket funeral in Chicago made international news in the fall of 1955. For supposedly flirting with a white woman (the woman finally admitted this year that she’d lied in her testimony) while visiting Southern relatives, he was beaten, tortured, shot and drowned in Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River by two men who would be acquitted of the crime. The face of a brutally murdered black child changed the world: Till’s death, its physical documentation, and his mother’s grieving (she chose a glass-topped casket, “so all the world can see what they did to my boy”), woke up the white liberal to the indefensible evil alive and well in the segregated South.
It was the symbolic weight of Emmett Till’s death mask that inspired the painting Open Casket by Dana Schutz, a prominent fixture in this spring’s Whitney Biennial. Schutz calls her painting an “engagement” with the famous tragedy, rather than an intentional “rendering” from the photograph. Protesters, critics, activists and other artists call the painting a insult to his memory, proof of the art world’s commitment to white supremacy, and, oddly, an attempt to make “fun” from tragedy.
Artist Hannah Black wrote “the painting must go” and proposed a literally iconoclastic solution: destroying it. A protester attempted to block it from view on the day the Biennial opened. The fact that Schutz is a Jewish woman who lives in Brooklyn, and a well-meaning white liberal, sparked the still-flaming outrage: “For a white woman to paint Emmett Till’s mutilated face communicates not only a tone-deafness toward the history of his murder, but an ignorance of the history of white women’s speech in that murder,” claimed The New Republic. Within a week, a fake letter of apology from the artist—asking the curators to remove the painting—circulated on social media. In reality, Schutz stands by her work, and the curators stand by it too.
Schutz explained in a recent interview with ArtNet that she was first moved to paint Open Casket in the late summer of 2016, citing escalating racial violence: “The photograph of Emmett Till felt analogous to the time, what was hidden was now revealed.” And, Schutz said, “I was struck by Mamie Till’s account of witnessing her son and her grief and rage. Her gesture of leaving the casket open was about visibility, sharing pain and witnessing.”
Schutz’s subject is a sacred symbol to the civil rights movement—but for an artist like Schutz, whose paintings often show a human body in a disturbed state, it is also a potent stylistic choice. She holds her subjects, necessarily, at enough of a distance to make a sneezing girl or Michael Jackson’s picked apart autopsy-table corpse an uneasy or even darkly, sickly funny mirror on human frailty. Open Casket, on the other hand, aims for intimacy. “I wanted the painting to be intimate,” she said—”but I wanted to show the brutality.”
The red boutonniere on Till’s cummerbund; the shapes, white faces, swirling above the lip of his coffin; these crass witnesses to a public mourning seem even to mock critics’ and defenders’ manifold piling on. In the interview, she refers often enough to an sort of unmasking that we wonder—or this viewer does anyway—whether in her “engagement with” Till’s mutilated face we’re to read the tension of what darker truths his death made a blind nation see. Stare at it too long, and Till’s face in Schutz’s painting will take on different forms, some sure to offend: From the lines that would make his face there also appears, for instance, the shape of a figure cowering in the fetal position, the physical manifestation of a desperate and innocent fear, vulnerability designed to have a mother’s protection drawn around it.
Schutz won’t sell the painting, she has assured—she never intended to. She knew it would be controversial, she said: “It is better to try to engage something extremely uncomfortable, maybe impossible, and fail, than to not respond at all.” But she probably hadn’t realized her signature, her white liberal well-meaning, would be the sticking point.
The widely circulated photograph from Emmett Till’s early September funeral triggered an outrage that would change the world. A mother’s grief, that universally recognized mourning with its monomythic magnitude, would not be ignored: a Pietà for the greatest sins of the American century.
When we do as the artist asks and remember the nearness and reality of this evil, segregating the sorrow that awakened the nation—condemning an empathetic tribute, because its author happens to be white—seems woefully counterproductive.
An earlier version of this story was paired with a photograph of the Breuer Building, home of the Whitney Museum from 1966 to 2014.
