16 Miles found the money quote [heh] about his upcoming US retrospective in Luc Tuymans’ TAN interview : “The US tour should lead to steady sales.”
But wait, there’s more! That guy has had it up to _here_ with American slowness in gettin’ on board the Tuymans train:
TAN: Are you happy with the selection of works for your US tour?
LT: Yes, it’s taken a long time for a US institution to ask me to do a show. There are 76 works. [Ed.: Exactly how long is a long time, Luc?] I’ve installed all 80 of my solo shows myself. This is the first time I can trust other curators to install my art. They’ve decided to re-create three exhibitions as they were shown in commercial galleries [“At Random”, Zeno X gallery, Antwerp, 2004; “Der Architekt”, Galerie Gebauer, Berlin, 1998; “Mwana Kitoko”, David Zwirner, New York, 2000] and then will work around this chronologically. It’s interesting as they’re not the most iconic works.
TAN: How do you think US audiences will respond to your work?
LT: The Demolition painting (2005) will be shown which has 9/11 connotations along with the Condoleezza Rice portrait (The Secretary of State, 2005). [1] Museum people didn’t buy it at the time because it was too topical. But then Glenn Lowry, MoMA director, decided to acquire it because she’s a public figure [Tuymans’s US dealer David Zwirner gave the painting to MoMA as a fractional gift in 2006]. It had been misunderstood in a private collection, it was out of place. The fact that it’s been acquired by a public collection is an interesting insight into how the American people think.
Belly up to the Tuymans bar, you molasses-assed American museum-curating bitches! Waitlist forms to the right, er, left!
Update/Note [1] Wait, a fractional gift? You mean David gave the Modern a great discount on his cut, or he bought it himself? Does your dealer still count as a private collection? Because Paul Schimmel told Tyler Green that “a lot of people wanted to buy the Condi,” and that Tuymans saw it as a diptych with Demolition. Both are now in MoMA’s collection. Demolition is listed as a 2006 fractional gift of Leonard and Susan Feinstein [of the Bed Bath & Beyond Feinsteins]. Ah, here it is: “The Secretary of State, Fractional and promised gift of David and Monica Zwirner,” with an accession number consecutive to Demolition. Sounds very smoothly orchestrated.
FWIW, MoMA’s description of Demolition directly contradicts Schimmel’s [or Green’s] statement that the painting “was not painted from photographs or video of the collapse of the World Trade Center, but it certainly recalls countless images from that day.”