“Neo Rauch at the Met: para”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
May 22, 2007-October 14, 2007
Neo Rauch is one of those names people use to counter accusations that painting is dead. And while it is true that Rauch, the foremost exponent of a group of young painters known as the Leipzig School, has resisted the more fashionable media of recent art stars such as Matthew Barney, it is unclear by the lights of his latest work whether contemporary painting will receive a boost on his shoulders.
In the fourteen works that Rauch created specifically for this exhibition in the low-ceilinged quarters of the Met’s mezzanine gallery, one encounters not slick video or portentous installation but something announcing itself as old-fashioned paint on canvas. And not just painting, but narrative (albeit obscurantist narrative) painting to boot. Rauch was no doubt justified in feeling that his project’s inherent lack of sex appeal, from a contemporary-art standpoint, was a challenge that required some effort to overcome: “Anyone who kept on painting [in the 1990s],” he said, “was the fat boy that no-one wanted to play with.” Unfortunately, his effort to create an up-to-date idiom for painting has led him to employ a number of shopworn tricks of postmodernism— cartoon hands on a frock-coated aristocrat, for example. Rauch’s assortment of costumed figures and strange objects resembles an avant-garde play rehearsal more than the masters he so clearly admires: Balthus, Beckmann, and the surrealists (more di Chirico than Dalí). It’s as if he doesn’t feel that paint alone can work a spell powerful enough to hold the contemporary viewer without receiving a lift from kitsch, which far from providing edge feels thuddingly blunted and tired.
Rauch has described his canvases as theaters and himself as the director. In this, he follows in the footsteps of another Leipzig-born painter, Max Beckmann. Like Beckmann, Rauch is interested in presenting enigmatic narratives that border on the allegorical: but where Beckmann’s dark theater was pageantry and circus, Rauch’s is closest to the opacities of the German experimental playwright Heiner Müller and the absurdist iconography of the director Richard Foreman. The most obvious example of this is Paranoia (all the paintings are from 2007), in which three figures peer extravagantly from the center of a bare-walled room toward an open door. The figures stand suspended, forever waiting for the threat (or, for the viewer, the significance and affective power) to materialize.
The proof is in the paint. Whereas Beckmann’s use of paint was arrestingly bold (he was a veritable poet of black), Rauch, in stark contrast to Expressionist emotionalism, brushes on a thin scrim of muted tones. (The effect somewhat recalls R. B. Kitaj, whose pigments are cool and application cerebral.) As several critics have pointed out, Rauch adopts the look of Socialist Realism (and at times comes dangerously close to the quality of illustrations for Boys’ Life). Under totalitarian governments in Eastern Europe, surrealist and absurdist art was a veiled means of protest. With the Berlin Wall long down, quoting Socialist Realism feels bloodless and without cost—just another reference in a jumble of private references.
Rauch’s compositions teem with curious figures and shifting perspectives, and that is part of their appeal: in one passage antique firemen wrestle hydralike hoses, while, nearby, people fly up into the air and a creature, half-man half-beast, crawls out from a fissure in the earth. Rauch’s paintings are dream dioramas, the figures safely under glass as we look in on their mysterious world. What to make, for example, of Jagdzimmer (“Hunter’s Room”) in which a group of figures stands around holding crossbows, while dead waterfowl dangle from the rafters and an old man flings himself back in his chair as if he’s seen a ghost? Or the vaguely sci-fi Goldgrube (“Gold Mine”) in which two men anachronistically clad in metal breastplates handle a wheelbarrow full of cow bones, as, beside them, a glowing, golden cavern gapes open? Rauch has explained that his paintings extend from his dreams, but his hermetic imagery and sweet tooth for kitsch produce cryptic, distant work. His scenes answer only to their own private logic, and in this they seem arbitrary and slapdash. As Delmore Schwartz reminds us, in dreams begin responsibilities, a fact that Rauch would do well to remember.
The catalogue for the show includes a brief note by the curator Gary Tinterow, and we should be grateful that Mr. Tinterow committed to presenting this exhibition of a painter in mid-career. It could be far worse. For three years beginning this September, Mr. Tinterow and the Met will display the twenty-two-ton “conceptual tank piece” of a shark suspended in formaldehyde by Damien Hirst. From the magisterial new Roman Galleries to a rotting shark: not even Neo Rauch could dream this stuff up.