The first U.S. retrospective of the major Belgian artist Luc Tuymans that is coming to the Dallas Museum of Art in June just opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The New York Times has a profile of Tuymans talking about his shock as a child learning that two of his uncles had been Hitler Youth. Not for nothing has Tuymans 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.”

The San Francisco Chronicle reviews the show here. Above, The Secretary of State, 2005, oil on canvas.