INTERVIEW LUC TUYMANS Left: Luc Tuymans at his recent
David Zwirner show, Forever:
The Management of Magic.
Behind him is Turtle (2007),
oil on canvas, 368 x 509cm
LUC TUYMANS
AGENT PROVOCATEUR
The influential Belgian painter reaches 50 this year, his fiery temperament undimmed.
Now Disney’s failed utopianism has fallen under his baleful gaze, not to mention
Gordon Brown, Gerhard Richter, Jan van Eyck – and the European anti-smoking laws
alentine’s Day seems altogether
V
too jolly a day for a painter as
reputedly dour as Luc Tuymans
to be appearing in public.
However, duty calls and here he
is, leading a herd of journalists
around David Zwirner’s gallery
in New York. Disney is the unlikely subject of his
latest series, and, while he relates how the
subject led him to thoughts about nostalgia,
utopia and the manufacture of magic, flash bulbs
pop and microphones suspended on booms bob
about over his head. He looks ill at ease: he has a
striking profile, with a strong, Roman nose, but
under pressure he tends to dip his head so that
his eyes look darkly hooded. Nevertheless, he
strides on.
The next day I return and join him alone in
a back room of the gallery. He sparks up a
Marlboro – the first of very, very many – and
I ask him why he submits to all this attention.
For after all these years, after all the art critical
accolades, after winning popular acclaim at
home in his native Belgium and, unarguably,
after achieving the status of one of a handful of
the most feted painters alive, hasn’t he earned
the right to silence?
“I’ve done it since the beginning,” he says,
“because I’m wary of [artists] who don’t talk and
every now and again say something so-called
intelligent. At first, it was just an act of generosity
– a kind of service – to the people who came to
look at the work. And people were very glad of
that, though now it’s turned against me and it
seems that people think that without the
explanation the work isn’t really there.”
Photos: Kathryn Hillier
Thus the duty to exhibit and explain propels
him onward. A major touring retrospective has
been planned for the United States next year, and
most pressing when I meet him are the
words: Morgan Falconer portraits: Kathryn Hillier
Luc Tuymans with his New York dealer, David Zwirner (left)
preparations for his retrospective at the Haus der
Kunst in Munich, which runs from March to May,
and then travels to the Warsaw’s Zacheta
National Gallery of Art. Entitled When
Springtime is Coming, the European show
contains 90 works stretching back to 1975,
includes work that draws on Zwirner’s show, and
also offers examples of a series completed last
year, entitled The Apparitions, which addresses
the Jesuit order.
Tuymans is a busy man – he says he and his
wife, the Venezuelan-born painter Carla Arocha,
have not had a holiday in six years – and yet he is
eager to fit in much more. His most ambitious
curatorial project to date, a two-part art exchange
between Belgium and China, sees its second part
unfold next year; he has toured and sung with
Antwerp art-rock band Monkypussy [sic]; he has
even, recently, become a silent partner in an
Antwerp bar called The Mogador, which he hopes
will enable him to survive the imposition of
LUC TUYMANS INTERVIEW
anti-smoking laws, whenever they come.
“Smoking for me is a cultural thing,” he says,
puffing contentedly. “It transports you
somewhere else. Of course it’s unhealthy, we
know that, but it has a cultural value, and
without smoking I cannot paint, I cannot talk,
I cannot write, so for me it’s clear that it’s an
essential part of my work. Smoking is an
artwork.”
All this activity would seem to leave little
room for painting, yet Tuymans has never hidden
the fact – contrary to his dealers’ requests – that
he paints his pictures in a single day. “I was
talking to Alex Katz about this yesterday,” he
says, “because he also paints large pictures in a
day. It’s a question of intensity and momentum
and attention span. I work up to the day for
months – researching, planning, drawing, taking
Polaroids – until the image is completely
formulated, and then it’s executed – it’s D-Day.”
At one point, in the early 1980s, Tuymans
abandoned painting entirely in favour of
filmmaking, and he still believes that film and
painting are close cousins. “I started to think that
the paintings were too existential, too
suffocating, and at that point a friend of mine
showed me a Super 8 film camera and I started to
make a diary. Really, there is very little difference
between painting and film – there’s a bigger
difference between painting and photography,
and I’d be a very bad photographer because I’d
always be late. Painting is a trajectory that goes
over time and through time, and that’s the same
for film.”
Apart from a few stills, he has rarely exhibited
the fruits of this period (“they’re unfinished,” he
says, “juvenile mistakes”). He has occasionally
exhibited work in unusual media – for his show
at the Haus der Kunst, he has created a 10-metre-
high chalk mural expanding on Wonderland, a
APR /MAY 2008 ART WORLD 45
INTERVIEW LUC TUYMANS
Above: W (2008), oil on canvas, 188 x 119.4cm
Below: Luc Tuymans with one of his Disney-inspired
paintings, Forever (2008), at David Zwirner, New York
46 ART WORLD APR /MAY 2008
“Every Belgian painter is traumatised from the
start, because the best painter in the entirety of
the western hemisphere is Jan van Eyck”
canvas in Zwirner’s show – but these, he says, are
digressions. “I’ve created an oeuvre of what is
now four hundred and fifty paintings, and I will
continue doing that as the main element of my
practice. There are the other things, yes, but they
are born of people’s curiosity to find out where
the images come from. They are just part of the
process, the end point is still painting.”
uc Tuymans was born in Mortsel,
L
a town just south of his present
home in Antwerp, in 1958, the
son of a Dutch mother and
Flemish father. He has talked
little of his upbringing, and he
made it clear to me that it was a
subject he was happy for people to go on
speculating about. But he helps this speculation
along, occasionally, by talking of certain
formative incidents from that time as provoking
fear (a picture of geese on his bedroom wall; even
a trip to see the movie Snow White). There was
certainly conflict. “To understand the history of
Belgium you have to understand the history of
collaborating with the Germans,” he explains. “In
the Second World War, the Flemish Nationalist
movement became interlinked with German
Nazism, and a lot of Flemish youngsters were
lured by priests into collaborating with the Nazis
in their fight against Communism. Now, one part
of my family is Flemish, and when I was five years
old, the whole thing exploded, because the Dutch
part was in the Resistance. And my parents’
marriage was not the best, there were a lot of
money problems, and whenever this crisis came
up it was always entwined with that history – and
it was always while we were eating. It turned into
a phobia.”
This experience of political history ripening
into family fireworks clearly shaped Tuymans, for
today he has an acute sense of the history and
culture of the region he lives in. It was this which
led him to tackle the rise of the Flemish extreme
right in a series of pictures from the mid-1990s
(around this time Tuymans also joined other
Belgian celebrities in a campaign which led to the
electoral defeat of the far right). And, in 2001,
when he was invited to exhibit in the Belgian
pavilion of the Venice Biennale, he produced a
series addressing the country’s troubled departure
from its former colonial possession, the Congo.
The show featured portraits both of the Congolese
leader Patrice Lumumba (whose assassination the
Belgian authorities have recently admitted
involvement in) and the late Belgian head of state,
King Baudouin, whom he depicted in a work
1
entitled Beautiful White Man. The intervention Works from Forever, the
caused controversy and led to the strange Management of Magic
experience of being button-holed by the widow of 1 Wonderland (2007)
the late King at a state dinner. “After dinner we oil on canvas, 353 x 547cm,
had a smoke and a brandy and I was introduced to studio view
the Norwegian King and Queen” he says, “then, 2 Epcot (2007)
all of a sudden a very small woman comes up – the oil on canvas, 154.3 x 222.9cm
former Queen of Belgium – and she asks me ‘Why
3 Simulation (2007)
did you paint my husband in that white uniform?’ oil on canvas, 221 x 294.6cm
I explained in one-and-a-half hours,” he laughs.
4 Magic (2007)
Controversies notwithstanding, Tuymans is a
oil on canvas, 122.6 x 165.7cm
very proud patriot – “one of the last Belgists,” he
5 Singing Flowers (2008)
says – and when I ask him what it is about his
oil on canvas, 105.4 x 146.7cm
home town that makes him smile, he begins a
long presentation on its glories past and present,
one which even culminates in him extolling its 2 3
transport connections and cheap property.
Inevitably, one of his earliest revelations as an
artist involved an encounter with a Belgian.
Submitting a portrait to a national competition
when he was 18, he won and received a cash
prize and a book on James Ensor. He opened the
book only to discover to his horror that his own
picture had been nothing but a kind of copy.
“I thought I had made something original,”
he has said, “and then I discovered that it was
impossible. The idea of the original faded away
and after a short crisis that gave a new idea: all
you can do is make an authentic forgery.”
As dogged then as he is now, though, he
persisted. He attended various art schools and
absorbed a rather old-fashioned education in
painting and, at night, he would come home and
work late on rather different, more sombre
pictures. Eventually he mounted a solo exhibition
of these works, which took place in a single day
in the shallow end of a drained swimming pool. 4 5
Nobody came. But Tuymans was confident he was
making progress. He has since left behind the
stark contrasts of his early style – the parched
flatness, the taut, sick, angular figures, and taken
on a new richness of tonality. Turtle, which
featured in Zwirner’s show, has about it the big
Photo: Kathryn Hillier. All images courtesy Luc Tuymans and David Zwirner Gallery
sweet sadness of fairground lights, and almost a
kind of warmth.
ritics who first wrote on
C
Tuymans’ work were struck by
its refusal to evoke; its refusal to
richly describe either the visible
world or the mood of the
painter. They latched on to
his looming negativity and,
assuming they had found another painter
heralding the end of their medium, claimed him
for the anti-painting camp. But Tuymans says he
APR /MAY 2008 ART WORLD 47
 Forever (2008)
oil on canvas,
174.6 x 177.8cm
CV LUC TUYMANS
Fast hand Luc
Luc Tuymans fronting Antwerp art-rock group, Monkypussy
uc Tuymans was well-known in
L Europe for his small, intense
works, before emerging onto the
wider international stage with
Superstition, a 1994 touring show, which
began in Toronto. In that same year, he
had his first solo exhibition in New York,
and featured in the group show Unbound,
at London’s Hayward Gallery. Since then
his star has risen ever higher, leading to
his major show at Tate Modern in 2004.
Tuymans’ diverse subject matter and swift
but precise painting style evolved in the
mid-1980s, when he made paintings
relating to that most unrepresentable of
events, the Holocaust. These blanched,
chilling images included his most
important early work, Gas Chamber
(1986). He has painted other major
historical events, too, but is just as likely to
produce images of wallpaper or even
Christmas decorations: he confounds his
audience repeatedly. For instance, after his
response to Belgium’s presence in the
Congo had caused a stir at the 2001
Venice Biennale, the art world expected a
comment on 9/11 for 2002’s politically-
charged Documenta. They got one, but it
was typically offbeat. Tuymans showed a
large still-life painting of a jug and some
fruit, rendered in his now signature
sombre, muted palette. “The attacks
were… an assault on aesthetics,”
Tuymans said. “That gave me the idea of
reacting with a sort of anti-picture, with
an idyll, albeit an inherently twisted one.”
Now Disney has fallen under Tuymans’
irreverent gaze, as he saps the company’s
primary coloured cheerfulness, and
focuses on EPCOT, its failed idea for a
utopian community, plus some of
Disneyland’s outdated or defunct
attractions. In W (2008) a sliver of Walt
Disney himself appears, almost cropped
out of the painting. His large shadow,
however, is ominously present.
48 ART WORLD APR /MAY 2008
“I’ve never met a single artist who has ever
asked me, ‘Why do you still paint?’”
was never anything of the sort. “It’s simply a
construction of critics,” he says, “and these
critical discourses apply to people like Gerhard
Richter or Vija Celmins, not to me, I’m a different
generation. Anyway, I’ve never met a single artist
who has ever asked me, ‘Why do you still paint?’.”
Frankly, it would be foolish to ask that of a
man like Tuymans: to talk with him is to hear,
again and again, finely perceptive and hard-won
observations about the work of looking and
painting which alone are ample justification for
his continued pursuit of the medium; thoughts
about everything from the appearance of objects
in mirrors, to the similarity of Edward Hopper’s
figures to toys, to the power of Jan van Eyck. Of
the latter, he currently has strong views: “Every
Belgian painter is traumatised from the start,
because the best painter in the entirety of the
western hemisphere is Jan van Eyck. There is
nothing to blow him away. His is the most
gruesome and unforgiving realism that has ever
been painted. It’s the first individual statement of
an artist.”
Perhaps, though, one wouldn’t dare ask
Tuymans such a thing for another reason: he’s a
LUC TUYMANS INTERVIEW
LUC TUYMANS WHEN SPRINGTIME IS COMING: SELECTED WORKS
The Haus der Kunst’s Tuymans retrospective, When Springtime Is Coming, boasts 90 works spanning four decades.
Below is a selection from each, ending with an image from The Apparitions, a new series addressing the Jesuits
The 1970s 1 2
1 Suicide (1975)
oil on wood, paper, wire, 115 x 100cm
2 The Arena (1978)
mixed media and oil on canvas, 605 x 785cm
The 1980s
1 La Correspondance (1985)
1 2 3
oil on canvas, 80 x 120cm
2 Die Zeit (part 4/4) (1988)
oil on cardboard, 41 x 40cm
All images © Luc Tuymans and courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp. The Arena: courtesy Ines & Philippe Kempeneers, Belgium. The Deal: photo Peter Cox. Suicide, Intolerance, Flemish Village, Bosom, Sunset: photos Felix Tirry
3 Suspended (1989)
oil on canvas, 60 x 40cm
The 1990s 1 2 3
1 Intolerance (1993)
oil on canvas, 80 x 70cm
2 Flemish Village (1995)
oil on canvas, 110.5 x 144.5cm
very fiery man. Far from being the wan and
gloomy hermit his paintings suggest, he is 3 Bosom (1995)
oil on canvas, 60.5 x 45.5cm
garrulous and amusing company; he loves to
strike bold positions and has not the slightest
fear of causing offence. Clearly getting into his
stride towards the end of the interview, he calls
Gordon Brown “fascistic”, says the French “are
responsible for all the major fuck-ups of the 20th
and 21st centuries”, and claims there are few
things he hates more than the Dutch. And when
I ask him of his opinion of Gerhard Richter he The 2000s 1 2 3
begins an oblique and circuitous tale about the
time he tried to meet him and was rebuffed. 1 Sunset (2002)
“It was based upon fear,” he says, “because of oil on canvas, 132.5 x 171cm
the painterly capacities of Mr Richter.” These, it 2 The Valley (2007)
appears, Tuymans does not rate highly: “Richter oil on canvas, 106.5 x 109.5cm
is a great artist, but he is not necessarily, for me, 3 The Deal (2007)
a great painter … He’s a romantic, as most oil on canvas, 166 x 140.3cm
Germans are – and which we Belgians are not.”
And with that he breaks into a raucous laugh.
Vive la Belgique!
Forever, the Management of Magic, was at David Zwirner,
New York, 14 Feb–22 Mar 2008
When Springtime is Coming is at Haus der Kunst, Munich,
2 Mar– 2 May; then Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw,
30 May–17Aug 2008
APR /MAY 2008 ART WORLD 49