IN GERMANY, the opposition between realism and abstraction has always been intertwined with the colliding political ideologies of east and west. Olaf Nicolai, an artist of East German origin, anticipates the next stage in this cultural battle with his sculpture A Portrait of the Artist as a Weeping Narcissus, 2000. By producing a life-size cast of himself, he calls up the earlier conflict around the dogma of Socialist Realism and recasts the issue by referring it to his own body. At a time when traditional approaches to painting are enjoying a boom with the vogue for a retro style of figuration,