On a recent morning in a tidy workshop a half-hour from his home in Düsseldorf, Thomas Schütte, one of Europe’s most celebrated artists, was face to face with a devil. It was deep blue, stout as a gnome, with phallic horns, grasping arms and gaping eyeholes. Soon to be cast in bronze, the sculpture was up on a forklift so its maker could look it in the eyes.
Was Schütte confronting his own image?
The monster’s arms were his, scanned in 3-D, and maybe its impish aura was his, too. As Schütte gave me a tour last month through workplaces in and around Düsseldorf — a bronze foundry, a ceramics workshop, an exhibition space — he talked with a devilish twinkle about having once faxed the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, which kept putting off the Schütte retrospective that now fills its sixth floor, to say that they would “talk about the show when I’m dead.”
He chuckled at the blowback he expects to greet some sculptures there of nude women, hacked up Picasso-style. And he derided most “advanced” conceptual art as “a dead end” — although his own versions are getting big play in the exhibition, which opens on Sept. 29 and runs through Jan. 18, 2025.
Schütte clearly takes pleasure in seeming fiendish.
But it’s mostly for show. The 69-year-old checking out that devil was also in blue, but it was the blue of an E.U. bureaucrat: blue jacket, pale blue dress shirt. He has neat, side-parted hair and unassuming glasses with plastic frames. In the European art world, if not yet in the United States, he is as establishment as could be: He has won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale and has had solo shows at major museums across the continent. And as he talks about art and life and a complex career, he reveals a measured, thoughtful side that fights his inclination toward the fearsome.
Schütte is as hard to pin down as any skilled politician, but the contradictions he swims in don’t feel like affectation or manipulation. He seems to have an innate urge to misdirect that also comes through in art that is so varied, complicated and even inscrutable that it’s equally hard to pin down.