The Denver Art Museum was the first American art museum to acquire a painting by perhaps the most famous member of the New Leipzig School – Neo Rauch.
In 2000, when these artists were still recent graduates of the Leipzig Art Academy and virtually unknown outside Germany, Dianne Vanderlip, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Denver Art Museum, purchased “Die Kanone (The Cannon)” (1995), a 15 1/2-foot oil on linen.
She has encouraged local collectors to acquire paintings by these artists, works that could become future gifts to the museum, and has pursued works by several other of the school’s leading members.
“Die Kanone,” along with loans of a painting and five photographs by Martin Eder, another of the Leipzig artists, will be on view in the modern and contemporary galleries when the museum’s expansion opens Oct. 7. Two more Rauch works will be part of the exhibition “Radar: Selections from the Collection of Vicki and Kent Logan.”
“We bought the Neo Rauch long before any other museum did,” Vanderlip said. “Now they’re (the Leipzig artists) widely popular, and we have been on their trail and going to Berlin for years when no one else was. The trick is getting them before they’re on the cover of The New York Times.”
