De Wandeling (The Walk)

In Luc Tuymans's paintings (born in Belgium, in 1958), the choices of the subjects and their treatments are always profoundly serious, engaged in history, attached to the traumas that it bears and to which we are subjected.
De Wandeling (The Walk) is based on a Super 8 film, probably by Eva Braun, where one can see Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer take off for a walk in a snowy landscape at Berchtesgaden, in Bavaria, where Hitler had a residency.
With two silhouettes seen from the back, their long shadows and the mountain landscape, the painting is also a take on how the aesthetics of German romanticism, in particular the art of the nineteenth-century painter Caspar David Friedrich, was employed and misinterpreted by the Nazi regime.