From left: Tilo Baumgärtel, Christoph Ruckhärberle, Martin Kobe, Matthias Weischer and David Schnell. More Photos >
With his moody dreamscapes, Neo Rauch helped to bring down the wall between the old and new in East German painting. More Photos >
When the painters who are now the young lions of the international art scene enrolled at the venerable Art Academy in Leipzig in the early 1990's, they wanted to study art as it was taught for centuries - drawing from nude models, mastering the rules of perspective and analyzing formal composition. The ascendance of abstract painting in the years after World War II had eroded that tradition in the West, elevating originality and authentic feeling over technique and lifelike depictions, and reducing the word "academic" to a slur. But the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall were effective windscreens, blocking artistic change from ruffling the German Democratic Republic. Figurative art that was deprecated as hopelessly passé in Paris and Düsseldorf never lost its grip in Leipzig. The city prided itself on being the birthplace of Max Beckmann and (if you looked back a few centuries and across Saxony to Wittenberg) on a painterly lineage begat by Lucas Cranach. "The disadvantages of the wall are well known," says Arno Rink, a 65-year-old recently retired professor of painting who served as director of the academy in Leipzig both before and after the wall came down. "If you want to talk of an advantage, you can say it allowed us to continue in the tradition of Cranach and Beckmann. It protected the art against the influence of Joseph Beuys."
Fifteen years ago, the East German Communist regime had only recently collapsed. For students arriving in Leipzig from the West, coal smoke in the winter sky and gaping windows in derelict buildings exuded a dank romantic allure. The atmosphere for those who had grown up in the East was even more intoxicating. Their world was in free fall, mutating rapidly and unpredictably. Even at the academy, which proudly claims a heritage more than two centuries old, change sizzled in the air. A department of new media was established so that students could make videos, design conceptual art and construct installations in the manner of the long-shunned Beuys. Meanwhile, in the unchanged department of painting, the rear guard clung to its palettes. "We learned how to construct a house in double perspective, or a staircase that spirals up," says Tilo Baumgärtel, an artist who was born in Leipzig. The painting students, many of them Westerners who had baffled their friends by journeying to the impoverished East for a traditional education, now had to withstand the ridicule of their peers. "Painting was the most boring department in the school, and everyone was making jokes about the painters, because they were so old-fashioned in the East German style," recalls Ricarda Roggan, a Dresden-born photographer.
The first hint of a shift appeared in 1997, when Neo Rauch won the art prize of the local newspaper, the Leipziger Volkszeitung. Rauch, now 45, came of age in the G.D.R., but he was young enough to absorb the imagery of comic books, television and computer graphics that shaped the stylistic tastes of his generation. He was a bridge between the older political painters of the G.D.R. and the young artists of a unified Germany. He wrote his master's thesis at the Leipzig academy on West German abstract painters of the 1950's, discussing works - "abstract painting, which is primarily color," he says - that he was unable to see except in "shabby black-and-white reproductions." Having risen, through industry and talent, to become an assistant to Professor Rink, Rauch painted large canvases in a style that hovered somewhere between Socialist Realism and Pop Art, of workers in 1950's-vintage uniforms performing enigmatic tasks of physical labor. The Leipziger Volkszeitung prize and the accompanying show of his work at the Museum der Bildenden Künste, which is the main Leipzig art museum, presaged an escalating demand for Rauch's paintings and a one-man show at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York in 2000. The painter with the strange moniker - his given name was an invention of his parents, and his family name means "smoke" - was gaining an international reputation that resounded in the academy. "Even in the halls of the school, it is a little smoky," the students joked. The success of Rauch seemed like a one-off, however. "During our studies we had the feeling that Neo was a very solitary phenomenon that couldn't be repeated," says Tim Eitel, a painter who moved East from Stuttgart in 1994.