Luc Tuymans Schwarzheide, 1986
Schwarzheide is an early masterpiece from Luc Tuymans’ body of mesmerizingly conceptual paintings. Presenting a seemingly inoffensive line of pine trees against a faded background, the work transforms into a sinister landscape upon titular association, named after a World War II concentration camp located north of Dresden. The painting’s simple composition, reinforced by Tuymans’s use of a diminished colour palette, echoes the chilling simplicity of the source image, a drawing realized in Schwarzheide by the illustrator and Holocaust survivor Alfred Kantor in 1945.
Alfred Kantor Original sketch done in Schwarzheide, 1945.
Remaining in the same collection since its execution, Schwarzheide has been included in Tuymans’s most significant exhibitions worldwide, including his very first solo show at Ruimte Morguen, Antwerp, in 1988, his inclusion in Documenta IX in 1992, his important survey at Tate Modern, London, in 2004, and his major retrospective travelling from the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, to the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, between 2009 to 2011. On the occasion of Luc Tuymans’s current monographic show La Pelle (“The Skin”), a magnified marble mosaic of Schwarzheide has been constructed by the artist to traverse the full expanse of the Palazzo Grassi’s ground floor. Capturing the continued importance of the original work – more than twenty years its elder – the marble Schwarzheide will coat the fabric of the Palazzo Grassi’s historic premises in Venice until 6 January 2020.
Luc Tuymans Schwarzheide, 2019, Fantini Mosaici Milan. Installation view at Palazzo Grassi, 2019. © Luc Tuymans, Palazzo Grassi. Photography by Matteo De Fina.
The importance of Schwarzheide lies in the honest expression of horror that pervades its source image. “Schwarzheide is an image of the naturalization of death”, the artist has said. “An image that captures violence at its peak through the paradoxical depiction of understatement. In my opinion, true horror is what you don’t show” (Luc Tuymans, in conversation with Marianne Hoet, 5 June 2019). In order to materialize the deafening sense of silence that exuded from Kantor’s original drawing, Tuymans closely observed the sketch’s most essential elements, and the visual effects of its aging over time. Crucially, he notes that the yellowish backdrop coating the surface of his work drew from the similar tone that was radiated in Kantor’s drawing. “I needed the yellowness to be revealed in the painting not as a gimmick, but as a true assessment of reality and time”, he said (Luc Tuymans, in conversation with Marianne Hoet, 5 June 2019).
Installation view of Schwarzheide in Galerie Maerz, Cologne, 1989
Unfathomably raw and potently suggestive, Kantor’s drawings – and Tuymans’s present painterly reproduction – are able to convey a world of atrocities through unmediated gestures and pure self-expression. They exude more reality than the moving images of films ever could: they are drenched in the feelings and truth of Kantor, the man who lived them. “Schwarzheide is about representation and debt, and the agent object had to be incorporated directly in the work”, the artist remarked (Luc Tuymans, in conversation with Marianne Hoet, 5 June 2019). Eluding the explicit depiction of crime and violence, the painting visually encapsulates what the German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil”; in other words, the “word-and-thought-defying” failure for evil to portray itself, its deeds and its enactors for what they truly are, through the demise of thought and reflection (Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem, 5 parts”, The New Yorker, February-March 1963, online).
Installation view of Schwarzheide in Vereniging voor het Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent, 1990
Schwarzheide was painted 41 years after Kantor’s liberation, 23 years following Arendt’s assertion of the “banality of evil”, and just a few years after the first airing of Sophie’s Choice and Shoah – two films which placed the Holocaust back to the forefront of the public’s collective unconscious in the 1980s. It additionally came on the heels of Tuymans’s five-year hiatus from the practice of painting, which he had embarked on around 1980 to focus on film. A number of film fragments from this period of experimentation informed the artist’s paintings to come; thence, he spent no longer than a day on his painterly creations, and began using cinematic techniques of enlargement and cropping. As a result, his images mixed impression, memory, real documents, and imagination; an amalgamation of sources that in turn conjured a confounding aesthetic akin to "studies in a kind of monochrome in which colors are subjected to an excess of light, fading whatever intense hue might have once been present to leave behind an indeterminate gray-blue-green-brown, the color of institutional hallways and old newspapers" (Helen Molsworth, ‘Luc Tuymans: Painting the Banality of Evil’, Luc Tuymans, Germany, 2011, p. 18).
Installation view of Schwarzheide in Documenta IX, Kassel, 1992
A visual materialization of memory, and the copy of a copy, Schwarzheide contains the aura of sacred documents and the weight of history, whilst boasting Tuymans’s unique skill in illustrating the unnamable. It is an honor to present such a historically, conceptually and visually important work as the leading lot of this June’s Evening Sale.
Read our interview with Luc Tuymans here >