FEW LIVING ARTISTS OCCUPY as central a position in the critical discourse of their medium as Luc Tuymans, whose painting practice has set important conceptual and material parameters for a generation. As much through his examination of our fragmentary, contingent experience of history as through his novel painting style (which accounts for photographic media without recourse to rendering), Tuymans has developed a distinctive artistic strategy that, at its best, creates compelling fusions of concept and form. Now midcareer, the fifty-one-year-old Belgian has recently been the subject of several