The Heritage IV
Luc Tuymans
Belgian, born 1958
1996
An oil on canvas by Luc Tuymans that reduces a photographed-looking scene—three cups on a shelf and a shadowed figure drinking—into a bleached, restrained image meant to evoke memory and moral ambiguity.
What strikes you is the hushed, near-monochrome palette and soft, tentative brushwork that flattens space so the cups and the silhouetted head read like faint, half-remembered evidence seen through a blurred window.
An exemplar of Tuymans’s influential approach, it helped show how painting could translate photographic fragments and fading recollection into quiet ethical inquiry, reshaping contemporary painting’s engagement with memory and history.
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
6' 6 5/8" x 49 1/2" (199.9 x 125.7 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Committee on Painting and Sculpture Funds
Accession
475.1996
Palette
Exhibitions
