I first met the German painter Neo Rauch shortly before Christmas last year, in Leipzig. It was one of the final days of his show at the gallery Eigen+Art, and the place was nearly empty. The show was called “Handlauf” (“Handrail”), and the title picture, roughly eight feet tall by ten feet wide, showed a solidly built, barefoot woman joining hands with a gentleman in leather boots. But the man’s hindquarters revealed him to be a centaur, and the woman seemed to have an extra leg and an extra face, to the side of her main one. They were in a tumbledown room in front of what looked like a stage backdrop of a classic German Romantic landscape—mountains, forest, clouds, moon—next to which a man cradled an electric guitar and a woman pounded some kind of tambourine.
This is what Rauch is known for: huge, dense, ostensibly narrative scenes in which narrative is stubbornly elusive. Events seem to take place in a parallel world. Portions of a canvas can be futuristic, with space-age infrastructure, while elsewhere there may be a sky out of Tiepolo and people who have come from the Napoleonic Wars or some primordial Europe. Rauch’s figures are bound together in tight compositions that recall Renaissance art one minute and socialist realism the next, and yet they remain sealed off from one another, unaware of anything around them, and their actions have a suspended quality. Alongside patches of preternatural calm, a discordant color breaks in, or a reptilian tail, or a burning backpack, or a Converse sneaker. The over-all effect is of allegorical painting, but these are allegories to which Rauch has thrown away the key.
As I walked around, a small, puckish man fell into step beside me and started to talk to me about Rauch and the Leipzig art scene. It was Rauch’s gallerist, Gerd Harry Lybke, who has been a figure in East German art since the early eighties. Universally known as Judy Lybke—for his resemblance to a character on the American television show “Family Affair,” which Leipzigers watched surreptitiously in the Communist years—he grew up wanting to be a cosmonaut but found himself working in a factory and being an artist’s model as a sideline. That’s how he met Rauch and the other artists who became known as the New Leipzig School. He ran a clandestine gallery out of his apartment, and manned the entrance in the nude, in part to dissuade Stasi agents from entering. By the time the Berlin Wall fell, he was a major impresario, and he soon became one of the chief gallerists representing art coming out of the former East. As he explained it to me, all the bottled-up energy of East German art seemed to have nowhere to go but to his gallery. He captured it all, and started uncorking it in the nineties, when Rauch and several of his other artists began to break into the Western market. Rauch’s pictures, which can nowadays fetch around a million dollars apiece, have established him as the unrivalled German painter of his generation.
Rauch’s work stands in stark contrast to that of German worthies such as Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer. A generation younger, Rauch is not preoccupied with German national shame, and he paints like someone who never got the news that other artistic media existed. Critics are sometimes put off by his painterly traditionalism, but more often they write about having been cornered into admiration in spite of themselves. “I was well prepared to dislike Rauch,” the art critic Dushko Petrovich Córdova wrote, after seeing a 2005 exhibition. “The first room of the show abruptly ended my plans. Three large Rauch paintings imposed themselves on the huge space in an entirely unexpected way. They reminded me, in their scale, of the altarpieces by Giotto and Duccio that dominate the first room of the Uffizi.”