EVERYWHERE IN NEO RAUCH'S paintings you see people at work—building, calculating, measuring, and producing—yet the machine has broken down. Mechanical fragments are strewn about. In the large-scale Lehre (Doctrine), 1999, a paunchy wrestler snoozes on the floor. His rather worldly dreams materialize on the wall behind him in the form of a monochromatic image. An official-looking figure is pointing at the black rectangle with a white stick, perhaps trying to explain some kind of statistical development to his female assistant. But the table is illegible, and the principles on which the