The first U.S. retrospective of Belgian painter Luc Tuymans is a hotly anticipated event. Jointly organized by the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, it opened this week at the Wexner and will tour to SFMOMA, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Bozar Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels.

Although they depict quotidian objects or seemingly banal settings, Tuymans’s paintings are invariably heavily freighted with political, philosophical, and historical content. Is it necessary for viewers to know their elaborate backstories?

"I struggled with that for years," says Helen Molesworth, curator of contemporary art at the Harvard Art Museum, who co-curated the Tuymans show with Madeleine Grynsztejn, director of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. "One of the reasons we made the catalogue the way we did, with old-fashioned catalogue entries, was because, over the course of organizing the exhibition, we ended up hearing all of the stories. We had 450 stories to go with 450 paintings. As you look at more and more Luc Tuymans paintings, you get to a point where you realize that there is always a story."

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the paintings’ success depends entirely on viewers poring over that catalogue, studying the complex history or inspiration of each work. "Tuymans is interested in the nonverbal communication that the visual offers us: how you, as a viewer, mediate between the narrative and the image," says Molesworth. "There’s a certain anxiety that hovers around a Tuymans painting; you are aware that there is something you don’t know. And then you have to decide: Am I going to learn about it, or am I just going to remain in this nimbus-like state of incompletion? My experience has been that no understanding of the subject matter has ever secured the image for me."

In the following slide show, Molesworth helps illuminate a handful of Tuymans’s paintings.