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Paintings for Now.

Article Excerpt
Abounding critical and commercial success has earned Neo Rauch a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, of fourteen typically virtuosic and befuddling paintings, all made this year. Rauch may be barely known outside the art world, but fame is increasingly superfluous to the establishment of an artist's sinecure. Insider buzz and sales to collectors of the right pedigree are what count. An influential teacher as well as painter, Rauch is the champion of a fertile scene in Leipzig--long an arts center--in the former East Germany. (In Germany, unlike here, teaching is a prized role of art stars.) He was born in Leipzig in 1960. When he was a few weeks old, his parents died in a train wreck, and he was raised by his maternal grandparents. He studied under the tottering academic regime of Socialist Realism, which lingers in his work's frequent suggestions of foul utopias peopled by smooth-browed heroes, laced with Surrealist uncanniness, and given Pop eclat. Aspects of his style bring to mind Goya, Beckmann, Balthus, and Magritte, as well as, in trace amounts, Jorg Immendorff and other West German neo-expressionists who affected him in the nineteen-eighties. He is a homebody, living with his wife and teen-age son in Leipzig, and bicycling six miles each weekday morning to his studio, in an old cotton mill. He teaches two days a week. On weekends, he gardens. His pictures feature structures and interiors familiar from his childhood: in his...