During a visit to New York late last fall, the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans sat on a couch in the dimly lighted lounge of the Bowery Hotel and recounted a disturbing childhood memory. One evening when he was 5, he said, his family was gathered around his paternal grandparents' dinner table. His mother's brother was leafing through a picture album when a photograph of one of his father's brothers–his own namesake, Luc–fell to the floor. The photo, Mr. Tuymans said, showed this uncle as an adolescent performing the Hitler salute.
"This was totally unexpected," said Mr. Tuymans, 51, explaining that his mother's family had been active in the Dutch resistance and in hiding refugees. For the first time, he said, his father admitted to her that two of his brothers had trained as Hitler Youth in Germany. After that, the artist said, the issue "was always looming" in his parents' home. The marriage was not a happy one, and with his mother more and more outspoken on the subject and his father increasingly introverted, Mr. Tuymans said, "I learned to eat very fast and get away from the table."
Perhaps not surprisingly, Mr. Tuymans–whose first major American retrospective opens this weekend at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, after an initial showing at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio–has become known for examining the visual residue of trauma and the collective desire to forget. Some of his best-known paintings deal with the Holocaust, the post-9/11 social and political climate in the United States and the legacy of the Belgian colonization of Congo–and with the ways such things linger, or don't, in the collective consciousness.