Thomas Meaney's "The Antagonist"

Neo Rauch (Photo by Lena Kunz)

I find I’m not quite done with the October 4, 2021, issue. There’s another piece in it I want to comment on, namely, Thomas Meaney’s “The Antagonist.” It’s a profile of the German painter Neo Rauch. I relish Meaney’s first-person perspective, beautifully established in his opening sentence: “I first met the German painter Neo Rauch shortly before Christmas last year, in Leipzig.” Meaney attends a Rauch exhibition at the gallery Eigen + Art (“As I walked around, a small, puckish man fell into step beside me and started to talk to me about Rauch and the Leipzig art scene”). He visits Rauch at his home in Leipzig (“When I visited him at home in July, he looked haggard, having had a particularly disturbed sleep, but on this occasion there was an additional factor: a techno party nearby”). He visits Rauch’s studio (“I rode a freight elevator up to the top floor and went through a pair of unmarked metal doors”). He goes with Rauch to Aschersleben, where there’s a permanent museum dedicated to his work (“I met him at his house, and we lowered ourselves into his 1992 Porsche 911. ‘Brewster green,’ he commented. You have to special-order the color’”). He has lunch with Rauch (“Over ox cheeks in rich red-wine sauce, potatoes, and beer, I asked Rauch if he wasn’t exaggerating the confrontation between abstraction and figuration in the nineties”). I devoured all these scenes. The problem is that Rauch doesn’t come across as particularly likeable. “The Antagonist” is one of those pieces – Janet Malcolm’s profile of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is another one that quickly comes to mind – in which the subject comes across negatively. Yes, Meaney calls Rauch “the unrivalled German painter of his generation.” But he also quotes the art critic Wolfgang Ullrich: “What are we to think when Rauch compares feminists to the Taliban?” What are we to think when we’re told Rauch is a fan of Ernest Jünger, an ideologue of authoritarianism and a glorifier of war? Meaney has chosen an unpalatable subject – an extreme right-winger artist. He must’ve known this going in. He must’ve known that he was going to inveigle himself into Rauch’s good graces, eat and drink with him, hang out with him, and ultimately betray him in print. I admired “The Antagonist,” but I didn’t enjoy it. “Betrayal” pieces always make me squirm. I feel embarrassed for both writer and subject.