The Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio will debut the tour this September, which was jointly organized with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Dallas Museum of Art will pick it up after SFMOMA, bringing it here in June 2010.

Luc Tuymans will be the first U.S. retrospective on Tuymans’ career and, with more than 70 works featured in it, the most comprehensive exhibition of his art to date. The Belgian is considered to be a crucial figure in contemporary European art, although he is not well known to the American public — the way Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter are. Born in 1958 in Belgium, where he still lives, Tuymans has been very conscious of the great tradition of Northern European painting — at the same time, World War II and the technologies of film, photography and television have informed his treatments of history, identity and media, with his paintings often taking off from actual still photos.

The title of this painting, for example — oil on canvas, 1997-98 — is “Himmler.”