Art Reviews Weekend

Luc Tuymans’s Moral Distance

David Carrier July 13, 2019

Luc Tuymans, “Secrets” (1990), private collection, courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp; installation view at Palazzo Grassi,
2019 © Palazzo Grassi, photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani e Marco Cappelletti

VENICE — Luc Tuymans is a figurative painter who is deeply suspicious about the power of
visual representations. Fully aware of their seductiveness, he doubts that they can ever be truthful.
And so the title of his exhibition, La Pelle (“the skin”), which comes from the 1949 Italian novel
by Curzio Malaparte, is apt.

A brilliant fascist writer who reported on both the Russian revolution in the late 1920s and the
German invasion of that country during World War II, Malaparte then worked for the American
army in 1943 during its occupation of Naples, and also wrote about that experience. Then in the
1950s he was attracted by both Maoism and Catholicism. His real name was Kurt Erich Suckert;
his chosen name, an inversion of Bonaparte, the good part, as Malaparte, the bad part, reflects his
moral identity. Far beyond merely being completely cynical, he was passionately in love with
presenting evil.

Luc Tuymans, “Turtle” (2007), private collection, courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London, installation view at Palazzo
Grassi, 2019 © Palazzo Grassi, photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani e Marco Cappelletti

Installed on the three floors of Palazzo Grassi, on the Grand Canal near the Academia, this show
of more than 80 works of all sizes is a full Tuymans retrospective. On the atrium floor is an
enormous marble mosaic, “Schwarzbeide” (2019), which is based on a histoical incident in which
black pine trees were planted around a Nazi forced-labor camp to hide it from local residents. The
prisoners secretly drew the scene in images that are reconstructed here.

What looks like a bucolic scene thus is actually a prison. On the atrium wall there is a portrait of
Albert Speer, the Reich’s Minister of Armaments and War Production. Then on the first floor you
see a blurred reproduction of cathedral as depicted in a book illustration; a painting of a postcard
send from inmates of a Czech concentration camp; and a portrait of a Japanese man, Issei
Sagawa, who, in 1981, murdered and cannibalized a female student at the Sorbonne.
Luc Tuymans, “Still Life” (2002), Pinault Collection; “William Robertson” (2014), The Broad Art Foundation, installation
view at Palazzo Grassi, 2019 © Palazzo Grassi, photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani e Marco Cappelletti

And the enormous “Still Life” (2002), more than five meters wide, is rendered in the style of Paul
Cézanne’s watercolors. Then on the second floor is “Ballone (Balloons)” (2017), picturing a
clown clutching a bunch of helium balloons, who hurts children with baseball bats; “Wandeling
(Walk)” (1989), a painting of Nazi dignitaries strolling around Berchtesgaden; and “Frozen”
(2003), an image of Chernobyl.

Tuyman’s images come secondhand from magazines, film stills, the internet, and iPhone photos,
as if he feared personal contact with his mostly ghastly subjects. The one direct reference to
Malaparte is “Le Mépris (Contempt),” a 2015 painting of the writer’s well-known modernist
house on Capri, based on a still from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 movie of that title, which was
filmed in that site.
Luc Tuymans, “Le Mépris” (2015), Collection of Mimi Haas; “Disenchantment” (1990), private collection; installation view
at Palazzo Grassi, 2019 © Palazzo Grassi, photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani e Marco Cappelletti

But the whole attitude of this exhibition draws, obviously, upon Malaparte’s novel. “To write
poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (1949). Theodor Adorno’s much quoted, often criticized
statement was later revised by Adorno himself. But look at Tuyman’s subjects: concentration
camps; Nazi portraits; a fake landscape; a fake woman’s body, which is just a doll; a book on
religious architecture; the Nazi Haus der Kunst in Munich.

How, he is asking (in my view) can sophisticated people who know the powers of wickedness
also, and often at the same time, practice evil? Tuyman’s practice, beneath the shadow of the
concentration camps, poses that question. And his style of representation, bleached out almost to
the point of invisibility, is perfectly adjusted to these subjects.
Luc Tuymans, “Simulation” (2007), Pinault Collection; installation view at Palazzo Grassi, 2019 © Palazzo Grassi, photo:
Delfino Sisto Legnani e Marco Cappelletti

Housed on three floors of a grand palace on the Grand Canal in a show timed to coincide with the
Venice Biennale, La Pelle certainly casts a shadow on the themes of the Biennale’s official
exhibition, May You Live in Interesting Times. In a perverse way, what times were more
interesting than the era of the Third Reich? “A style of painting,” Meyer Schapiro wrote, “is often
likened to a worldview, a mode of thought, a metaphysical system.”

Certainly that is the case for Tuymans. What counts, the handout at the gallery says, “is not the
subject matter but how it is treated.” With his faintly colored images, Tuymans keeps his subjects
at a distance. I don’t admire the worldview I see presented in his paintings. I think that, to the
extent that they are taken seriously in implying that evil is omnipresent and seemingly
inescapable, they are politically frivolous, if not downright destructive.
Luc Tuymans, “Ballone” (2017), private collection, installation view at Palazzo Grassi, 2019 © Palazzo Grassi, photo:
Delfino Sisto Legnani e Marco Cappelletti

In that way, his way of understanding history is akin to the worldview expressed in Malaparte’s
well-written novels. And yet, I admit, I have read those novels with fascination and I have looked
attentively at these paintings. I, too, can be spellbound by evil. And so I do greatly admire
Tuymans’ art for so perfectly expressing this worldview. As it has been said, better to have a
personal style than none at all.

But I wouldn’t want to live with one of his paintings — not for all of the tea in China. Tuymans
makes Francis Bacon at his most ferocious look agreeable. Marcel Proust, who was Tuymans’
literary hero, certainly was interested in portraying evil. But when he presents Baron Charlus’s
ghastly sadomasochistic rites, he is very conscious of the role of play-acting. The Baron wants to
pretend that the poor boys paid to whip him are murderers. But here, I confess, I am not sure who
is playing what role, or where loathing ends and obsession begins. Which is to say the morality of
Tuymans’ paintings will continue to elude me, even if they are, I grant, great works of art.

This is the second of three reports from Venice and Vienna. (See Navigating the Overload at the
Venice Biennale and Reconciling Secular Art in Sacred Spaces.)

Note: My short quotation of Meyer Schapiro comes from his Worldview in Painting- Art and
Society: Selected Papers (1999).
Luc Tuymans: La Pelle continues at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy, through January 6, 2020.

© 2025 Hyperallergic