LUC TUYMANS INTERVIEW INTERVIEW LUC TUYMANS

LUC TUYMANSAGENT PROVOCATEURThe influential Belgian painter reaches 50 this year, his fiery temperament undimmed.

Now Disney’s failed utopianism has fallen under his baleful gaze, not to mentionGordon Brown, Gerhard Richter, Jan van Eyck – and the European anti-smoking laws

words: Morgan Falconer portraits: Kathryn Hillier

Valentine’s Day seems altogethertoo jolly a day for a painter asreputedly dour as Luc Tuymansto be appearing in public.However, duty calls and here heis, leading a herd of journalistsaround David Zwirner’s gallery

in New York. Disney is the unlikely subject of hislatest series, and, while he relates how thesubject led him to thoughts about nostalgia,utopia and the manufacture of magic, flash bulbspop and microphones suspended on booms bobabout over his head. He looks ill at ease: he has astriking profile, with a strong, Roman nose, butunder pressure he tends to dip his head so thathis eyes look darkly hooded. Nevertheless, hestrides on.

The next day I return and join him alone in a back room of the gallery. He sparks up aMarlboro – 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 criticalaccolades, after winning popular acclaim athome in his native Belgium and, unarguably,after achieving the status of one of a handful ofthe most feted painters alive, hasn’t he earnedthe right to silence?

“I’ve done it since the beginning,” he says,“because I’m wary of [artists] who don’t talk andevery now and again say something so-calledintelligent. At first, it was just an act of generosity– a kind of service – to the people who came tolook at the work. And people were very glad ofthat, though now it’s turned against me and itseems that people think that without theexplanation the work isn’t really there.”

Thus the duty to exhibit and explain propelshim onward. A major touring retrospective hasbeen planned for the United States next year, andmost pressing when I meet him are the

preparations for his retrospective at the Haus derKunst in Munich, which runs from March to May,and then travels to the Warsaw’s ZachetaNational Gallery of Art. Entitled WhenSpringtime is Coming, the European showcontains 90 works stretching back to 1975,includes work that draws on Zwirner’s show, andalso offers examples of a series completed lastyear, entitled The Apparitions, which addressesthe Jesuit order.

Tuymans is a busy man – he says he and hiswife, the Venezuelan-born painter Carla Arocha,have not had a holiday in six years – and yet he iseager to fit in much more. His most ambitiouscuratorial project to date, a two-part art exchangebetween Belgium and China, sees its second partunfold next year; he has toured and sung withAntwerp art-rock band Monkypussy [sic]; he haseven, recently, become a silent partner in anAntwerp bar called The Mogador, which he hopeswill enable him to survive the imposition of

anti-smoking laws, whenever they come.“Smoking for me is a cultural thing,” he says,puffing contentedly. “It transports yousomewhere else. Of course it’s unhealthy, weknow that, but it has a cultural value, andwithout smoking I cannot paint, I cannot talk,I cannot write, so for me it’s clear that it’s anessential part of my work. Smoking is anartwork.”

All this activity would seem to leave littleroom for painting, yet Tuymans has never hiddenthe fact – contrary to his dealers’ requests – thathe paints his pictures in a single day. “I wastalking to Alex Katz about this yesterday,” hesays, “because he also paints large pictures in aday. It’s a question of intensity and momentumand attention span. I work up to the day formonths – researching, planning, drawing, takingPolaroids – until the image is completelyformulated, and then it’s executed – it’s D-Day.”

At one point, in the early 1980s, Tuymansabandoned painting entirely in favour offilmmaking, and he still believes that film andpainting are close cousins. “I started to think thatthe paintings were too existential, toosuffocating, and at that point a friend of mineshowed me a Super 8 film camera and I started tomake a diary. Really, there is very little differencebetween painting and film – there’s a biggerdifference between painting and photography,and I’d be a very bad photographer because I’dalways be late. Painting is a trajectory that goesover time and through time, and that’s the samefor film.”

Apart from a few stills, he has rarely exhibitedthe fruits of this period (“they’re unfinished,” hesays, “juvenile mistakes”). He has occasionallyexhibited work in unusual media – for his showat the Haus der Kunst, he has created a 10-metre-high chalk mural expanding on Wonderland, a

Luc Tuymans with his New York dealer, David Zwirner (left)

Left: Luc Tuymans at his recentDavid Zwirner show, Forever:The Management of Magic.Behind him is Turtle (2007),oil on canvas, 368 x 509cm

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canvas in Zwirner’s show – but these, he says, aredigressions. “I’ve created an oeuvre of what isnow four hundred and fifty paintings, and I willcontinue doing that as the main element of mypractice. There are the other things, yes, but theyare born of people’s curiosity to find out wherethe images come from. They are just part of theprocess, the end point is still painting.”

Luc Tuymans was born in Mortsel,a town just south of his presenthome in Antwerp, in 1958, theson of a Dutch mother andFlemish father. He has talkedlittle of his upbringing, and hemade it clear to me that it was a

subject he was happy for people to go onspeculating about. But he helps this speculationalong, occasionally, by talking of certainformative incidents from that time as provokingfear (a picture of geese on his bedroom wall; evena trip to see the movie Snow White). There wascertainly conflict. “To understand the history ofBelgium you have to understand the history ofcollaborating with the Germans,” he explains. “Inthe Second World War, the Flemish Nationalistmovement became interlinked with GermanNazism, and a lot of Flemish youngsters werelured by priests into collaborating with the Nazisin their fight against Communism. Now, one partof my family is Flemish, and when I was five yearsold, the whole thing exploded, because the Dutchpart was in the Resistance. And my parents’marriage was not the best, there were a lot ofmoney problems, and whenever this crisis cameup it was always entwined with that history – andit was always while we were eating. It turned intoa phobia.”

This experience of political history ripeninginto family fireworks clearly shaped Tuymans, fortoday he has an acute sense of the history andculture of the region he lives in. It was this whichled him to tackle the rise of the Flemish extremeright in a series of pictures from the mid-1990s(around this time Tuymans also joined otherBelgian celebrities in a campaign which led to theelectoral defeat of the far right). And, in 2001,when he was invited to exhibit in the Belgianpavilion of the Venice Biennale, he produced aseries addressing the country’s troubled departurefrom its former colonial possession, the Congo.The show featured portraits both of the Congoleseleader Patrice Lumumba (whose assassination theBelgian authorities have recently admittedinvolvement in) and the late Belgian head of state,King Baudouin, whom he depicted in a work

entitled Beautiful White Man. The interventioncaused controversy and led to the strangeexperience of being button-holed by the widow ofthe late King at a state dinner. “After dinner wehad a smoke and a brandy and I was introduced tothe Norwegian King and Queen” he says, “then,all of a sudden a very small woman comes up – theformer Queen of Belgium – and she asks me ‘Whydid you paint my husband in that white uniform?’I explained in one-and-a-half hours,” he laughs.

Controversies notwithstanding, Tuymans is avery proud patriot – “one of the last Belgists,” hesays – and when I ask him what it is about hishome town that makes him smile, he begins along presentation on its glories past and present,one which even culminates in him extolling itstransport connections and cheap property.Inevitably, one of his earliest revelations as anartist involved an encounter with a Belgian.Submitting a portrait to a national competitionwhen he was 18, he won and received a cashprize and a book on James Ensor. He opened thebook only to discover to his horror that his ownpicture had been nothing but a kind of copy.“I thought I had made something original,”he has said, “and then I discovered that it wasimpossible. The idea of the original faded awayand after a short crisis that gave a new idea: allyou can do is make an authentic forgery.”

As dogged then as he is now, though, hepersisted. He attended various art schools andabsorbed a rather old-fashioned education inpainting and, at night, he would come home andwork late on rather different, more sombrepictures. Eventually he mounted a solo exhibitionof these works, which took place in a single dayin the shallow end of a drained swimming pool.Nobody came. But Tuymans was confident he wasmaking progress. He has since left behind thestark contrasts of his early style – the parchedflatness, the taut, sick, angular figures, and takenon a new richness of tonality. Turtle, whichfeatured in Zwirner’s show, has about it the bigsweet sadness of fairground lights, and almost akind of warmth.

Critics who first wrote onTuymans’ work were struck byits refusal to evoke; its refusal torichly describe either the visibleworld or the mood of thepainter. They latched on tohis looming negativity and,

assuming they had found another painterheralding the end of their medium, claimed himfor the anti-painting camp. But Tuymans says he

“Every Belgian painter is traumatised from thestart, because the best painter in the entirety of

the western hemisphere is Jan van Eyck”

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Works from Forever, theManagement of Magic

1 Wonderland (2007)oil on canvas, 353 x 547cm,studio view

2 Epcot (2007)oil on canvas, 154.3 x 222.9cm

3 Simulation (2007)oil on canvas, 221 x 294.6cm

4 Magic (2007)oil on canvas, 122.6 x 165.7cm

5 Singing Flowers (2008)oil on canvas, 105.4 x 146.7cm

Above: W (2008), oil on canvas, 188 x 119.4cmBelow: Luc Tuymans with one of his Disney-inspiredpaintings, Forever (2008), at David Zwirner, New York

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was never anything of the sort. “It’s simply aconstruction of critics,” he says, “and thesecritical discourses apply to people like GerhardRichter or Vija Celmins, not to me, I’m a differentgeneration. Anyway, I’ve never met a single artistwho has ever asked me, ‘Why do you still paint?’.”

Frankly, it would be foolish to ask that of aman like Tuymans: to talk with him is to hear,again and again, finely perceptive and hard-wonobservations about the work of looking andpainting which alone are ample justification forhis continued pursuit of the medium; thoughtsabout everything from the appearance of objectsin mirrors, to the similarity of Edward Hopper’sfigures to toys, to the power of Jan van Eyck. Ofthe latter, he currently has strong views: “EveryBelgian painter is traumatised from the start,because the best painter in the entirety of thewestern hemisphere is Jan van Eyck. There isnothing to blow him away. His is the mostgruesome and unforgiving realism that has everbeen painted. It’s the first individual statement ofan artist.”

Perhaps, though, one wouldn’t dare askTuymans such a thing for another reason: he’s a

very fiery man. Far from being the wan andgloomy hermit his paintings suggest, he isgarrulous and amusing company; he loves tostrike bold positions and has not the slightestfear of causing offence. Clearly getting into hisstride towards the end of the interview, he callsGordon Brown “fascistic”, says the French “areresponsible for all the major fuck-ups of the 20thand 21st centuries”, and claims there are fewthings he hates more than the Dutch. And whenI ask him of his opinion of Gerhard Richter hebegins an oblique and circuitous tale about thetime he tried to meet him and was rebuffed.“It was based upon fear,” he says, “because of the painterly capacities of Mr Richter.” These, itappears, Tuymans does not rate highly: “Richteris a great artist, but he is not necessarily, for me,a great painter … He’s a romantic, as mostGermans 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 2008When Springtime is Coming is at Haus der Kunst, Munich,2 Mar– 2 May; then Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw,30 May–17Aug 2008

Fast hand Luc

L uc Tuymans was well-known inEurope for his small, intenseworks, before emerging onto the

wider international stage withSuperstition, a 1994 touring show, whichbegan in Toronto. In that same year, hehad his first solo exhibition in New York,and featured in the group show Unbound,at London’s Hayward Gallery. Since thenhis star has risen ever higher, leading tohis major show at Tate Modern in 2004.Tuymans’ diverse subject matter and swiftbut precise painting style evolved in themid-1980s, when he made paintingsrelating to that most unrepresentable ofevents, the Holocaust. These blanched,chilling images included his mostimportant early work, Gas Chamber(1986). He has painted other majorhistorical events, too, but is just as likely toproduce images of wallpaper or evenChristmas decorations: he confounds hisaudience repeatedly. For instance, after hisresponse to Belgium’s presence in theCongo had caused a stir at the 2001Venice Biennale, the art world expected acomment on 9/11 for 2002’s politically-charged Documenta.They got one, but itwas typically offbeat.Tuymans showed alarge still-life painting of a jug and somefruit, rendered in his now signaturesombre, muted palette. “The attackswere… an assault on aesthetics,”Tuymans said. “That gave me the idea ofreacting with a sort of anti-picture, withan idyll, albeit an inherently twisted one.”Now Disney has fallen under Tuymans’irreverent gaze, as he saps the company’sprimary coloured cheerfulness, andfocuses on EPCOT, its failed idea for autopian community, plus some ofDisneyland’s outdated or defunctattractions. In W (2008) a sliver of WaltDisney himself appears, almost croppedout of the painting. His large shadow,however, is ominously present.

CV LUC TUYMANSThe 1970s1 Suicide (1975)oil on wood, paper, wire, 115 x 100cm

2 The Arena (1978)mixed media and oil on canvas, 605 x 785cm

The 1980s1 La Correspondance (1985)oil on canvas, 80 x 120cm

2 Die Zeit (part 4/4) (1988)oil on cardboard, 41 x 40cm

3 Suspended (1989)oil on canvas, 60 x 40cm

The 1990s1 Intolerance (1993)oil on canvas, 80 x 70cm

2 Flemish Village (1995)oil on canvas, 110.5 x 144.5cm

3 Bosom (1995)oil on canvas, 60.5 x 45.5cm

LUC TUYMANS WHEN SPRINGTIME IS COMING: SELECTED WORKSThe 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 2000s1 Sunset (2002)oil on canvas, 132.5 x 171cm

2 The Valley (2007)oil on canvas, 106.5 x 109.5cm

3 The Deal (2007)oil on canvas, 166 x 140.3cm

“I’ve never met a single artist who has everasked me, ‘Why do you still paint?’”

Luc Tuymans fronting Antwerp art-rock group, Monkypussy

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Forever (2008)oil on canvas,

174.6 x 177.8cm

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