German painting’s arch-traditionalist has a brush with controversy.
“I can’t remember what I was doing on the day the Wall fell,” Rauch told me, getting up to refill our vodkas. He put some corned beef in Smylla’s bowl, and then realized that another bowl of it had already been set out. “A lucky day for her,” he said, shrugging.
Rauch’s first international break came at the 1999 Armory Show, in New York, where his work was one of a handful of pieces by German painters. Roberta Smith, of the, singled him out as a Leipzig artist “who mixes various illustrational styles with beautiful paint handling and a sense of lost Utopias, and the more Pop-like work of Liz Arnold.” It was only a line, but both Rauch and Judy Lybke attribute their ascent to Smith’s notice.
Rauch was spared such indignities, but in 1999 a West German curator mounted a controversial exhibition in Weimar called “The Rise and Fall of Modernism.” The exhibition juxtaposed rooms of Nazi art with rooms of G.D.R. Communist art, as if they were equal parts of the gruesome legacy that unification had overcome. Rauch was appalled to find that a Communist-era painting of his, a state commission for a national youth association, was in the show.
“That’s the Petersberg,” Rauch said, as a small mountain came into view, and told me that it was the highest point between Saxony and the Urals. “I’ve painted it many times. There’s a twelfth-century church, a Bismarck monument, a G.D.R.-era TV tower, and a roller coaster.” It sounded like a site made for Rauch. I noted that there seemed to be a lot of wind turbines in the area.
Over ox cheeks in rich red-wine sauce, potatoes, and beer, I asked Rauch if he wasn’t exaggerating the confrontation between abstraction and figuration in the nineties. Weren’t Richter and Kiefer andall figurative? “But it wasn’t the painters who were in control,” Rauch shot back. “It was the age of the curator.
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