Building Consensus: Painting and the Enlightenment Tradition in Post-Wall Germany

Abstract

No recent group of German painters has attracted as much global attention as East German born Neo Rauch (born 1960) and the younger generation of Western painters who studied with him at Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig. According to Joachim Pissaro, chief curator of painting and sculpture at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, these artists have “taken the art world by storm.”1 Known as the New Leipzig School, they employ an illusionistic style that builds on the GDR’s socialist-realist painting tradition, a convention that was once derided as propagandistic and derivative.2 Rauch and his younger colleagues adapt this style by incorporating popular cultural references and modernist Western forms into their traditional illusionistic aesthetic. Like the previous generation of West German painters, such as Jorg Immendorf, Gerhard Richter, and Anselm Kiefer, the Leipzig artists reflect on Germany’s complex past. As Stephanie D’Alessandro puts it, “For more than fifty years, German artists have struggled with such direct repercussions of the past, and 2026; [with] the burden of the idea of history itself.”3 For these artists, however, this burden has largely been lifted. For post-Wall German painters, D’Alessandro concludes, “the war is no longer the limit and sole focus of historical consciousness—they are free to select from multiple pasts and use them to varying degrees in their work.”4