The Belgian Luc Tuymans is the most challenging painter in the recent history of the art, if recent painting can still be said to have a history, and not just a roll call. A retrospective of the fifty-one-year-old artist at the Wexner Center for the Arts, in Columbus, Ohio (it will travel to San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, and Brussels), invites a verdict. Mine is a thumbs-up. Tuymans’s thinly brushed, drab-looking (but sneakily lovely) canvases, usually based on banal photographic images with wispy political associations, do two big things at once. First, they dramatize the fallen state of painting since the nineteen-sixties, when Andy Warhol merged it with mechanical reproduction, and Minimalism petrified it with a basilisk stare. Not for Tuymans the tragic pathos of the previously preëminent Gerhard Richter, whose several styles, alternately realist and abstract, have acknowledged the collapse of any coherent tradition in painting, but have done so with defiant bravura, clinging to the old, grand manners. Tuymans’s grayish daubs announce that the war against mass media and Minimalist skepticism is truly over, because it's truly lost. Second, Tuymans discovers in the very humiliation of the medium a vitality as surprising as a rosebush on the moon. He does so with nothing-to-lose audacity, in terms of subject matter. If painting has nothing significant left to say, he seems to reason, it might as well say nothing about significant things. He works in thematic series, whose topics have included the Holocaust, disease, Flemish nationalism, Belgian colonialism, post-9/11 America, and the mystique of Walt Disney. It's hard to tell how invested he is in his subjects, but he is plainly fascinated by the power of images to roil minds and hearts.