I went to the Metropolitan Museum Friday afternoon and spent some time on the museum rooftop seeing Frank Stella on the Roof exhibition, also quickly revisiting Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings: The Clark Brothers Collect , mostly for the Van Gogh painting The Night Café and then as I was about to leave to meetup with a friend at a downtown party, I discovered Neo Rauch at the Met: para  and spent a  half an hour transfixed by a German artist who I knew nothing about till yesterday.

Warten auf die Barbaren (Waiting for the Barbarians), 2

I think of Balthus immediately - but there’s more - something old and yet, something new here as well - and a masterpiece of painting.

All the paintings in the show (I believe there are 10) were painted in 2007.  In the case of Warten auf die Barbaren (Waiting for the Barbarians),0llllI was reminded of the Roman Villa paintings from antiquity, some that are actually housed at the Metropolitan Museum’s Greek and Roman wing. 

I also noticed Paranoia   a long painting that does everything I’ve tried to do with color - better than I’ve been able to - yes, I admire what Neo Rauch has done - and the mastery of his paintings.

Looking at the left part of the picture, creating space with color transitions - it’s a masterpiece.   I’ll come back at least a couple of times to see the paints of Neo Rauch here at the Metropolitan, at least, till Mid October, when they go back to Germany, where Neo Rauch lives.   Too bad he’s not visiting NYC sometime, I’d like to interview him for ArtNewYorkCity.com.

And to finish up my trip to the Metropolitan yesterday, here’s a YouTube Video that has many of my thoughts about what I saw yesterday - about Art being Compressed Time - of the gravity of what I was seeing (also the Frank Stella sculptures were great - though I could not really be sure what I was feeling when I looked at them) and a couple of snippets of Neo Rauch - as much as I was allowed to capture on my video camera - it’s getting very hard to take videos in museums lately - the guards make it almost impossible to take pictures of anything.

Enjoy the movie.