The Consolation of Illustration
Dana Schutz’s Console at The Metropolitan Museum of ArtJanuary 18, 2026 | by Candice T. Seymour
Painters sure seem to love Dana Schutz. Allegedly she’s a painter’s painter. Whatever that means. If Schutz’s Console is a painter’s painter’s painting, the epithet must not mean much. With a color scheme like that of a children’s television series, the mid-sized painting shows two composite figures, one with the head of a cartoon-like dinosaur and the other a cyclopic half-human, forming a compositional chiasmus as they embrace. Their mismatched parts—more or less human or artificial, natural or prosthetic—suggest wear and tear, and repair: limbs ripped off, subsequent surgeries performed without requisite replacement parts. The plasticky quality of the oil paint recalls children’s toys and the unmixed impastos that visually stack to compose the hybrid figures suggest the piecemeal constructions of Tinker Toys or Lincoln Logs. It is tempting to imagine that through this hug the two figures are supporting each other, engaging, perhaps, in another exchange of parts, as their chiasmic configuration and the title suggest.
Yet this narrative of deformation and reformation is merely suggested (its substance recalled, imagined) by a viewer who, disappointed by the painting, tries to grasp why the Metropolitan Museum of Art would give it a wall in its contemporary wing (thereby claiming it to be an exemplar of 21st-century art). The painting’s form—its specific relation of parts to whole, visually and conceptually—lacks the composition, decomposition, and recomposition of material and image necessary to realize such a narrative. Or if you, like me, suspect that no paintings are, nor possibly could be, narrative, but, rather, must (to be art at all) embody what it is they are of; that is, to realize a painted world in which two creatures of artifice have their given bodies destroyed and repaired piecemeal, the painting itself (its givens and its body) would have to undergo a process of destruction and reconstruction analogous to that of its depicted toy-like subjects.
But the painting is made without play, despite its cartoon-y style, and without struggle, despite the amputations and repairs that its Frankenstein figures seem to have undergone. The confusion of which body part belongs to whom is only superficial: overlapping bodies, a contaminating brushstroke crossing one color scheme into the other. The few dollops of paint, suggestions of the play in painting, the accidents that lead to discoveries, function more like stickers: one imagines them carefully applied to the canvas after it was finished, like cherries on top of a sundae. The thin yellow-and-blue background reads as a way of filling space quickly and merely, a rote solution with no significant relation to the figures. Ultimately, the painting is superficial, like the figures it represents. But unlike them, it has not been torn apart and rebuilt. Its body remains safely intact, if empty: decorated with pretty colors and kind-of-nice brushstrokes. If it had taken its own world seriously (embodying instead of illustrating), it might have risked decomposition, attaining life by cannibalizing itself. But it stopped short, content with mere suggestion.
Perhaps to be a painter’s painter is to play it safe, believing that a predetermined composition, a premixed palette from an undergrad color theory lesson, and some controlled impastos are enough. Painter’s painters would be, then, those would-be painters who never develop beyond the level of the art student (in the narrow sense of performing rote actions within specified limitations; not the sense in which all real artists must remain students). If that’s the case, a painter’s painter (at least according to this painting by Schutz) isn’t a painter at all, but an illustrator of painting, who, consoling herself with what she already knows, ignores the moment when a painting demands to become itself by tearing itself apart.
About the Author:
Candice T. Seymour lives and works in New York. Her essays have been published in Caesura and Perseity.