Gallery owner David Zwirner is displaying the Leipzig painter’s work. “Re-enchantment of the world,” he says, is his mission. And in doing this, he resorts to the traditions of the early German Romanticist, Novalis.
The rain gets heavier. Collar up, head down, off to Chelsea. It’s not far — half an hour on foot — and then finally into the warm gallery. “Welcome on this rainy morning,” says David Zwirner. Neo Rauch, whose exhibition is opening today, is standing next to him, and Zwirner apologizes for his bad English. “He grew up behind the Iron Curtain like me,” he says.
Rauch doesn’t let his linguistic challenges stop him from speaking to the 70 or 80 journalists who are encircling him at a respectful distance about his new pictures in English. “How German are you, Mr. Rauch?” “I am simply German. And, yes, I feel deeply linked to the history and tragedies of my country.” “He’s hardly a Frenchman,” says David Zwirner with a laugh, and the journalists laugh, too, of course. Not a Frenchman: Anyone can see that.
The questions are not very sophisticated — not very New York City, more Texas. “What do you want, Mr. Rauch? What is the point of your pictures?” “Re-enchantment of the world,” he says. That is his mission, not illuminating every last corner of the world the Novalis way.
In the end, Neo Rauch makes a good point. “I don’t do concept art, because I have no concept,” he says. There is more laughter. Anyone can see that too. Not a Frenchman and without a concept — clearly a German.
‘Great People’ in East Germany
Now that the question and answer game is over, things turn more serious. Sports coats are exchanged for suits. Art and art lovers meet; the hour of the collector strikes. Someone says that the large work over on the wall to the right should quickly be hung on the back wall. The collector who is interested in that picture always buys the picture that is hanging on the back wall.
The thing that concerns the Germans and Americans flows effortlessly around us throughout this evening in Chelsea. We know each other, we value each other, we speak each others’ language; we do business. The clamor about the end of the trans-Atlantic era is far away. Later on, when we are eating in the Village, an American collector tells me about his time in Berlin. After re-unification, he bought an East German company. It went under, but he spoke about his employees there with great warmth. “Great people,” who had worked hard and wanted to succeed, he said. “Unfortunately the West German market didn’t give them a chance.”
And where would Neo Rauch’s phenomenal success be without American collectors, without New York?
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