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Lot Essay
Mythology has always been a source for creative inspiration and metaphor to artists through time and no myth seems more consistently prescient than the myth of Icarus and Daedelus. Ovid's legend tells the story of Icarus and Deadelus, father and son imprisoned atop a tower high above Crete by Minos the king. Daedalus reasons that the king may control the land and sea but that the air is controlled by no man. Icarus's father uses his brilliance and ingenuity to derive an unlikely escape plan for himself and his son producing wings from gathered feathers and wax so that they might take to the skies and flee their captivity. The two men take to flight and, ignoring his father's warnings, Icarus finds himself unable to resist his impulse to fly closer and closer to the sun. Tragically, the wax melts and the feathers drop from Icarus's body; no longer able to navigate the air he falls flailing to the ocean below.
The necessity of moderation seems clear to Dana Schutz through her choice of subject; she is keenly aware of the storied discipline required to escape a perilous end. In both Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (illustrated above) and Icarus, landscape dominates the picture. In Bruegel's masterpiece the legs of the fallen Icarus are the only limbs visible as the water swallows him up. Only the shepard takes notice of the event, the labors of life continue as they must. In Schutz's version it is not the event that is illustrated but a moment long after the event has taken place. Long gone are the sailing ships populating Bruegel's vision. Icarus appears to be an elegy to the event, a tribute to the hero of a free-spirited people that are touched by fire, who live hard and die young. Pictured is what may be the White Mountains of Crete or the Island of Icaria surrounded by the Icarian Sea, fabled to be the place where Heracles found and buried Icarus's body. At the center of the canvas sits a heavily impastoed form created of rich and raw color periscoping up from the sea-bed exposing limb-like eroded forms presumably part of a natural rock outcropping. This form occupies the picture in the same way that Philip Guston's dismembered and tangled limbs might. The image is handled with both Guston's wrist and deKoonings eye--a form with an ever changing identity, a liquid distillation of cubism. The form rises like an effigy sculpted by nature's elements to pay tribute to the memory of Icarus and those poor souls that dare challenge the fates. There is no moral resolution in Icarus. We are left knowing that the essence of the myth will repeat itself again and again through the generations for it is the spirit of youth and youthful enthusiasm that is both eulogized and memorialized within the painting.
The necessity of moderation seems clear to Dana Schutz through her choice of subject; she is keenly aware of the storied discipline required to escape a perilous end. In both Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (illustrated above) and Icarus, landscape dominates the picture. In Bruegel's masterpiece the legs of the fallen Icarus are the only limbs visible as the water swallows him up. Only the shepard takes notice of the event, the labors of life continue as they must. In Schutz's version it is not the event that is illustrated but a moment long after the event has taken place. Long gone are the sailing ships populating Bruegel's vision. Icarus appears to be an elegy to the event, a tribute to the hero of a free-spirited people that are touched by fire, who live hard and die young. Pictured is what may be the White Mountains of Crete or the Island of Icaria surrounded by the Icarian Sea, fabled to be the place where Heracles found and buried Icarus's body. At the center of the canvas sits a heavily impastoed form created of rich and raw color periscoping up from the sea-bed exposing limb-like eroded forms presumably part of a natural rock outcropping. This form occupies the picture in the same way that Philip Guston's dismembered and tangled limbs might. The image is handled with both Guston's wrist and deKoonings eye--a form with an ever changing identity, a liquid distillation of cubism. The form rises like an effigy sculpted by nature's elements to pay tribute to the memory of Icarus and those poor souls that dare challenge the fates. There is no moral resolution in Icarus. We are left knowing that the essence of the myth will repeat itself again and again through the generations for it is the spirit of youth and youthful enthusiasm that is both eulogized and memorialized within the painting.