Open Casket, by Dana Schutz, on display in 2017.
Photo: Benjamin Norman/The New York Times/Redux
Before Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016) came to the Whitney Biennial, the painting was displayed nearly 4,000 miles away at a commercial gallery in Berlin. It was part of a solo exhibition titled “Waiting for the Barbarians,” some of whose works — the gallery noted — Schutz had created in response to the “increasingly blurred” lines between “fact and fiction” in American culture. This collection of works would “reflect real events.”
The painting, equally clinical and tempestuous, depicts Emmett Till. Factually, Emmett was 14 years old when he was brutally murdered in Mississippi in…
