Luc Tuymans @ Wexner Center for the Arts

Luc Tuymans is the most challenging painter in recent history. A retrospective of the fifty-one-year-old Belgian artist at the Wexner Center for the Arts, in Columbus, Ohio, invites a verdict. Mine is a thumbs-up. Tuymans’s thinly brushed, drab-looking (but sneakily lovely) canvases, usually based on banal photographs with wispy political associations, dramatize the fallen state of painting since the nineteen-sixties. Tuymans also discovers in the very humiliation of the medium a surprising vitality. He does so with audacity, in terms of subject matter. He works in thematic series, whose topics have included the Holocaust, disease, Flemish nationalism, Belgian colonialism, post-9/11 America, and the mystique of Walt Disney. One of Tuymans’s first definitive works is a 1986 painting of the gas chamber at Dachau. The first-person touch of his brush is the work’s sole, and frail, emotional anchor. Tuymans is Flemish, a native and lifelong resident of Antwerp. He quit painting in the early nineteen-eighties to pursue filmmaking, resuming in 1985. Tuymans’s works would rather whisper than shout, though always in a vicinity of raw nerves. He has recently painted both a series touching on Belgian politics and a suite responding to America in the era of George W. Bush. His 2005 painting of Condoleezza Rice both demands and rejects answers. Tuymans articulates a modern tradition that gives equal weight to the dazed German Romanticism of Friedrich and the wide-awake Parisian modernity of Manet. He has compared his method to the self-developing of Polaroids, saying of his process, “It’s like I don’t know what I’m doing but I know how to do it, and it’s very strange.” Tuymans is influential among younger painters, but he is not apt to become popular.