Fragments of Europe: Neo Rauch at the Met

The Neo Rauch show currently at the Met is a strange beast. Not least because the Museum has chosen to cram about 10 paintings, all reasonably large-scale into a very small mezzanine gallery. The low ceilings and tight hanging of the canvases may perhaps add to the atmosphere of oppression and foreboding that many of the works produce, but it also serves to undermine the monumental character that not a few of the paintings suggest.

The term monumental here refers not to a judgment of the worth of the work but rather indicates the manner in which the paintings reference (amongst many other things) social realist art and its attempts to elevate the proletariat to the highest levels, or at least maintain the illusion of its elevation. Die Flamme is a good case in point here. At first glance the subject has the determined gait of the archetypal good worker making his way to the factory on time. Flags held in both hands suggest patriotism and loyalty, while the featureless face makes of him an Everyman. One thus imagines the paintings suspended high on the museum wall, with little distraction around it, demanding our awe and submission.

Such a mode of display would throw into even greater relief the ambiguities and fractures at the heart of the work for these in my view are what is at stake. If we are to take Rauch at his word, then his paintings do not express single, coherent meanings. Much of their content, so he says, consists of dream imagery. On the individual canvases the images are not made to integrate but rather blur at the edges, shading into each other as if the paintings were collages with the hard edges painted over.

As such they bring to mind the work of another German, the writer W.G Sebald, whose books concerned themselves with a similar inability to integrate memory and history, to make the fragments of the past cohere into a life. Both artists use what we might call a method of alignment to create echo and reverberation within and between the works. In this way the fragments of history can start to indicate what has been left out by outlining aporias, the shapes of what is missing.Think too of the name of the show 'Para' which suggests many words (paraphrase, paradox) without necessarily reconciling them.


Of course this attempt brings with it the question of the author's/artist's position within such a history. This is why painting and the artist are so often referenced in the works on show here.In both Jagdzimmer (right) and Paranoia there are paintings in the background. In Vater a man holds a camera, that points not at the man-child in the fathers arms but at the smoky indeterminate space between light (candle) and man (father).
Most significantly, in die Flamme the figure is astride over a trough containing paint tins, while the planks of wood lashed to his legs make an absurdity of any manoeuvre.

Thus the painter's dilemma is that of the European of late Modernity. It is the question of how to reconcile Europe's highest achievements and aspirations with its worst excesses and degradations. Monarchy and socialism, tradition and innovation, urbanism and pastoralism, classicism and modernism. Can one respond or is it a sisyphean task? We shall see. In the face of uncertainty, conservativism is always a temptation and Rauch has indeed described himself as conservative. But one can also cast light on the uncertainty of where we stand in history in the hope of least appreciating, if not understanding it as Rauch also seems to do. Rauch is ambiguous about his position, but then again, such ambigiuity is wholly in keeping with the dilemma.