Drawings by Neo Rauch: Suddenly a huge gun appears in the landscape

First, the good news: Neo Rauch can be funny. Very funny. The recently opened exhibition of a selection of his childhood drawings makes this abundantly clear. It effortlessly and entertainingly reveals a facet of his oeuvre that had previously been barely apparent. In the drawings created between 1965 and 1968, however, there are little men who form into a portrait head and almost fall out of the picture laughing.

In a colorfully designed "hidden object" scene, comical figures gather for grotesque activities. The young Rauch's extraordinary talent for caricature and portraiture is clearly evident. The influence of comics is evident in many of the drawings. A display case at the end of the tour, containing seventeen issues of the East Berlin-produced "Mosaik" comic series, serves as a reminder of this.

The same display case also addresses a less humorous aspect of the exhibition: the military and violence. In the same display case lie several toy soldiers, along with other war toys, including three artillery pieces and a Wehrmacht car with two soldiers in the front seats. The 100 drawings in the exhibition also correspond with this martial arrangement. A large portion of the exhibits repeatedly depict armed soldiers from various eras – individually, in groups, idle, or in combat. Some drawings resemble caricatures, while others possess a ghostly seriousness. Finally, depictions of heavy battle tanks and a bomb marked with an "A," reminiscent of the "Fat Man" dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, convey a powerful sense of military violence and threat.

It's not always clear which historical period the military references originate from. Some depictions recall uniforms and field battles from the Napoleonic era, others the Spanish Civil War or World War II. The massive presence of the Red Army in the GDR may also have been a source of inspiration for some sketches.

The exhibition of Rauch's childhood drawings offers a completely new perspective on the adult artist's work. Threat and violence abound in Rauch's work. Particularly after German reunification, titles such as "Zünder" (Detonator), "Exerzierplatz" (Exercise Ground), "Kleine Kanone" (Little Cannon), "Gefecht" (Battle), and "Tank Fire" (Tank Fire) proliferated. Even in the following years, the martial element persisted. Quite the opposite. In the large-format works created after the turn of the millennium, the figurative element steadily increased, along with the threatening potential of the works. On enormous canvases, 19th-century hussars brandish their sabers, or men in modern uniforms handle long weapons, incendiary devices, detonators, and bombs. Suddenly, enormous artillery pieces appear in the landscape, or a battle tank bursts through the picture space.

Several painting titles seem to directly refer to the nearest theater of war, for example, in the painting "Retreat" from 2006. In the foreground of this major work stands a handcart loaded with gasoline canisters; in the background, a manor house is burning, and nearby, civilians are being executed by a uniformed firing squad. A bronze sculpture created shortly afterwards bears the telling title "Rearguard." It is personified by a hybrid creature, half human and half animal, carrying two gasoline canisters. There's no doubt about it: the only thing left behind here is "scorched earth."

To explain the military mania in Rauch's childhood drawings, interviews repeatedly point to the World War stories of his male relatives, as if to answer the still-relevant question "How does war get into children?" But the roots of this military-artistic complex reach further back into local history. Aschersleben was the headquarters of the Magdeburg Hussar Regiment No. 10 from 1813 to 1884 and became a Wehrmacht garrison in 1937. An artillery barracks was located there from 1938. In addition, there were other military units and armaments factories, including a branch of the Junkers Works and an Army Ammunitions Plant.

All this comes at a price. In 1944 and 1945, Aschersleben became the target of Allied bombing raids, resulting in numerous civilian casualties, including many "foreign workers" from the war-critical industries. This war remains tangible in the town to this day: In the window of the local Gewandhaus concert hall, watercolors from 1945 and text panels from the 1970s depict the low-level attacks and bombings, as well as the final fighting, the conquest of the town by the Americans, and its takeover by the Russians. A direct line leads from this to Rauch's childhood drawings.

Neo Rauch and the curators in Aschersleben have laid an unmistakable trail from the war stories to the artist's oeuvre, not only through interviews and martial toys in the display case. This also applies to seven recent works by Rauch that have been integrated into the exhibition. Here, visitors encounter numerous clues from the past and hussars of the Magdeburg Regiment No. 10, recognizable by their green uniform jackets and caps with visors.

In one case, a delicate boy watches two hussars smoking; in another sheet, ambiguously titled "Neo 65," a hussar watches over the same boy, who now sits at a drawing table. Why the artist and curators chose to trace this connection to war is something the exhibition doesn't reveal, of course. But it teaches more about Rauch's paintings than many blockbusters of recent years. And it offers an ironic yet affectionate look back at his own beginnings as an artist.