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Figuring the new Germany: close on the heels of Leipzig native Neo Rauch, younger artists from the eastern German city are garnering critical attention. Two private collections on view in the U.S. spotlight this school representational painting
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Gregory Volk
A first glance at press releases and public relations materials for two recent overlapping exhibitions at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) and the Cleveland Museum of Art revealed them to be remarkably synchronous and also a bit suspect. Both featured representational paintings by the same group of Leipzig painters who studied at the city's Hochschule fur Grafik und Buchkunst (Academy of Visual Arts) and remained in Leipzig after graduating, as opposed to moving to a more renowned art center like Berlin. Along with a few friends and colleagues, they have become known as the New Leipzig School, and have already received substantial critical attention and commercial success. Six of them--Tilo Baumgartel, Martin Kobe, Tim Eitel, Christoph Ruckhaberle, David Schnell and Matthias Weischer--were born in the early 1970s; they were teenagers in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down, and they have come of age in a reunified Germany. Baumgartel and Kobe grew up in the former East Germany, the other four in West Germany. For them, choosing to study and then to continue living in Leipzig, responding in their work to the city and its environs, reverses the decades-old, pre-Wall tendency of many artists to go West for freedom, inspiration and unfettered careers.
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The seventh artist in both shows is Neo Rauch. Born in Leipzig in 1960, he is something of an elder statesman and a source of inspiration to the others. Only a few years ago Rauch was little known outside of Germany. He has since rocketed to fame, with quirky, exquisitely rendered works mixing romantically tinged landscapes; strange, often nonsensical machines and devices; people in heroic, socialist-realist-type poses who also seem bewildered and lethargic; an atmosphere of ambiguous nostalgia; intimations of broken-down utopias; and a peculiar symbolism that promises much meaning, but also baffles and startles. His homegrown work liberally borrows, transforms and renders completely idiosyncratic elements of a specifically East German culture, from ca.-1960s signage to exhortatory posters and rampant bureaucrats. Increasingly, the world has come to Rauch, to the point where he is widely acclaimed as the premier contemporary painter from the former East Germany and also, perhaps, the next great German painter altogether, following an earlier generation that includes Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, Jorg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer and Martin Kippenberger.
Aside from figuration, the New Leipzig artists share an unadulterated interest in (mostly) oil-on-canvas painting--often at a grand scale--and a belief that this "traditional" medium is more than capable of responding to contemporary circumstances. Painting has had a long and illustrious history at the Academy of Visual Arts, which is among Germany's oldest art schools, founded in 1764. While the artists' paintings are not literally about Leipzig, it is likely that the city has energized and focused their inquiries. With about 500,000 inhabitants, it is an industrial center also long known for its cultural vibrancy in publishing, music and visual art. Since 1989, and especially in the last few years, Western materialism has become a driving, in some ways invasive, force in Leipzig as well as in other former East German cities, while unemployment remains high, and population loss continues. One obvious question is whether Leipzig's special cultural attributes can survive and flourish in these changed circumstances, or if they will succumb to an onslaught of products, development and a homogeneous, Western-influenced lifestyle. Still, in contrast to Berlin or Cologne, the pace is slower and less frenetic; Leipzig is not as overwhelming and leaves more room for private contemplation and solitude. Inner life and longing still matter, and history is a pervasive, visceral force. The New Leipzig painters are making a fresh kind of urban art that is not about blare and dynamism. Instead, they seek evocative moments in a medium-size city with a big past, ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach to Max Klinger and Max Beckmann and, on a political note, the famed 1989 demonstrations originating at the Nikolaikirche (St. Nicholas Church) that eventually led to the fall of the Communist government.
"Life After Death: New Leipzig Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection" at MASS MoCA is the larger of the two shows; its two dozen works remain on view until early February 2006. More modestly scaled is "From Leipzig: Works from the Ovitz Family Collection" at the Cleveland Museum of Art, with one painting by each of the seven participants. Four of the seven artists exhibit at Eigen + Art, a gallery with branches in Berlin and Leipzig, which had its start in the 1980s as a rambunctious and courageous alternative space in Leipzig; it has flourished since reunification to become a major force in Germany and on the world art scene. According to the Cleveland Museum of Art, the New Leipzig School is "the first art world phenomenon of the 21st century," and, according to MASS MoCA, it is "the 21st century's first bona fide artistic phenomenon." Both exhibitions, incidentally, consist solely of works by men, recalling bygone eras when most artists were painters and most painters were men.
