Luc Tuymans' paintings hint at gruesome back stories

The colors used by Luc Tuymans (pronounced TOY-mens) are intentionally bilious. They are the physical manifestations of the weak-kneed response one gets when the 52-year-old Belgian artist delivers the back story to his paintings. Sickly greens, ochers that look like stains, grays made of purples and oranges like a healing bruise are what pass for riotous color in a Tuymans work. As he charged through the galleries at the Dallas Museum of Art this week while his first U.S. retrospective was being installed, he seemed to take a perverse delight in delivering the horrific story lines behind his paintings, like a comic would a joke, ending his narratives with a sardonic laugh and a two-beat pause for the audience's response.

Holocaust atrocities, political assassinations, mysterious dead bodies, medical conditions, acts of terrorism, paranoia -- these are the subjects that inspire him to vent with vengeance.

The show of 75 works is from his output over the past three decades, in particular paintings from four previous gallery exhibitions that are sequestered in four galleries off the DMA's huge barrel vault. The oldest and smallest works are housed in the largest space, which seems contrary to what would work the best, but they hold the room, and the larger pieces become enormous in the more confined spaces.

Tuymans abandoned a filmmaking career in the mid-'80s to pursue painting, which was not in vogue at the time. Even more outmoded was his penchant for portraiture. His brush with creating films can be seen when he turns his hand to painting cycles based on a single event, although each painting resembles an outtake more than a plot-enhancing scene. The paintings are often constructed in a horizontal format, or with images cropped as if they have to fit a television or computer screen, replicating the delivery mode of most news-related images.

Nothing by Tuymans is a walk in the park, even if it looks like a bucolic setting. In one of his early works from 1986, a graphically simple landscape of trees is sketchily painted on top of regularly spaced vertical lines. Schwarzheide could almost pass for a holiday greeting card, except Schwarzheide was a WWII concentration camp where prisoners made drawings, then ripped them into strips and shared the pieces. This image was re-created by one of the former prisoners, Alfred Kantor, who published a book of drawings of life in the Nazi prison that was source material for Tuymans' Holocaust series. Lampshades of human skin and ghostly white gas chambers are subjects of this group.

The portraits are often used as iconic representations of Tuymans' oeuvre, and they are distinctly his, with pasty, flat faces, usually with laconic expressions devoid of any spark.

One anomaly is a portrait of a smiling Rotarian typical to midcentury mug shots. The Heritage VI is not what it seems. The white-haired gent is painted in a palette of grays with horizontal brush strokes that replicate a faulty horizontal hold on a black-and-white television. This is Joseph Milteer from Georgia, a Klansman and political extremist who plays a minor role in some of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories and a potentially larger one in the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination. Tuymans chose this home-grown bigot to paint after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, when Americans were looking to the Middle East for terrorists to blame.

One of Tuymans' most powerful suites of images is based on Belgium's rule of the Congo and the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister. The paintings are reconstructed images from propaganda films, newsreels and snapshots. Like the evidence at a trial, the exhibits are fractions of the whole story, and Tuymans doesn't tidy up the crime scenes -- he makes them even more oblique.

Lumumba was killed by a firing squad and his body dissolved in sulfuric acid; only bits of his skull, a few teeth and the bullets survived the acid bath. Tuymans illustrates the mortal remains in Chalk, as two pieces of chalk in a pair of outstretched black hands. None of the details of Lumumba's death are included on the accompanying text panels with the exhibit. To get the back story, or the gory story, to Tuymans' paintings, one has to purchase the exhibition catalog, which is quite a good read both for historical significance and Tuymans' artistic influence.

Tuymans was raised in Antwerp and still lives there. He extensively researches his choice of atrocities and then in a flurry of activity makes his paintings in a single sitting. If the result does not appeal to him, it is destroyed. So even though his paintings have grown larger over time, they are all quickly made, as if the stories have to be told in a single chapter.

Some of the works made when he was quite poor are painted on pieces of cardboard nailed to plywood backing boards. When he could afford better art supplies, he often made numerous paintings layered on a single canvas. Later works created during more affluent times are painted on unstretched canvas, and when they are finished, the stretcher size is chosen to fit the expression. No matter when they were made, they all have the dramatic thrust of a street evangelist. Tuymans may be hanging in more elite locations now, but it doesn't mean he has tempered his rage at the inhumanity of man.

The stories that compel him are similar to the ones that drive contemporary German painters Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer. The Baader-Meinhof gang moved Richter to make a 15-painting cycle of fuzzy videolike images of the incarceration and suicide hangings of gang members. Kiefer represented the Holocaust with huge paintings of desolate stump fields of harvested vegetation.

Texas does not escape Tuymans' gimlet eye. He says he was looking for photographs of Ginger Rogers, something to represent the 1940s -- a time between wars, when the world economy was in upheaval and social ills were rampant. He found instead a couple dancing on the state seal of Texas, probably taken at an inaugural ball. It works for the "fiddling while Rome burns" time in recent history, suggests Joshua Shirkey in the accompanying catalog.

A painting entitled W might entice conclusion-jumping, but don't be hasty. W is for Walt, as in Walt Disney, and this is a painting of him -- or at least of a sliver of his left side, standing in front of a map of his manifest destiny, illustrating his expansion plans from Anaheim to most of northern Florida. It never came to pass. Disney died before he could buy up the top half of the state.

But it is a good lesson in looking. Nothing is as simple as it seems -- neither Tuymans nor his work.

Gaile Robinson is the Star-Telegram art and design critic, 817-390-7113