After overcoming the shock to my psyche of seeing an art world moment I very much lived right in and through turned into an historicized theme for a summer group show at David Zwirner—who, let’s be clear, was also there the first time, and so is, for some reason, partly doing this to himself—I did wonder what the Rubells’ Luc Tuymans painting of Jesus was doing there.
The first time I saw this, I wondered about Tuymans’ source image; a few years after this he’d made some works using Mormon imagery—actually, he took Polaroids of the screen while watching a show on Belgian TV in the late 1990s.
In the 1990s the LDS Church had begun using a newer, more naturalistically painted picture of Jesus with a red cloak, like this one, but the angle was different. It still made me wonder. If Tuymans had used it for source/inspiration, it seemed odd that he’d change the angle and entire composition so significantly. And he did not.
This painting was from a Feb. 1999 show at Zeno X in Antwerp titled “The Passion.” It was a series related to the Passion Play performed every ten years at Oberammergau, Germany.
Turns out Tuymans used the photo from the catalogue of the 1970 production of the actor who played Christ, Helmut Fischer. [update: while I knew the foundational anti-semitic history of the Passion Play, on Bluesky Jörg points out how that anti-semitism persisted, even after Oberammergau’s biggest fan (Hitler) was defeated. Turns out the 1970 production, the first since Vatican II, was specifically condemned by the Pope for keeping newly disavowed bigoted portrayals of Jesus-era Jews. They’ve been working on it ever since.]
While that clears that up, I do still wonder about Zwirner revisiting Circa 1995 New Figuration just as the Rubells are divesting it. This could be driven less by art history and more by estate planning.