At the risk of evoking unpleasant memories of high-school English, can we please discuss the word allegory? It refers to a story or a painting that comes with a moral or a lesson, perhaps a social or political one. And, in an era when figurative art has returned to prominence, the New York galleries are filled with a profusion of both allegorical paintings and their very opposite — which is to say, paintings that reject third-person narration in favor of first-person self-exposure. I caught two shows last week — Dana Schutz’s and Tracey Emin’s — that represent the two extremes.
Schutz, who’s now 47, is our leading painter of oil-on-canvas allegories. Her current show, “Jupiter’s Lottery,” — her first at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea — is a substantial and exciting affair that brings together 15 large-scale, exuberantly colored paintings and seven related bronze sculptures that come with a cast of sad-funny characters adrift in a fallen, post-Edenic world.