This year Neo Rauch celebrated his 50th birthday with not one, but two simultaneous largescale retrospectives. One was at the Museum der Bildenden Künste in his hometown of Leipzig – a city now as famous for the school of painting Rauch pioneered as it is for being the final resting place of J.S. Bach ­– the other at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. Commenting on the honour, news service Deutsche Welle barked, ‘He is one of the country’s most important living painters, and a de facto ambassador for modern German art’. On the commercial side, with Rauch’s work breaking its record price at auction (his 1999 painting Stellwerk sold for £892,450 in December), the artist is busy giving it away: donating 40 works on paper ­with a value of $130,000 to Aschersleben, the city of his grandparents. Rauch has promised to follow this initial bundle by giving away all subsequent work in the same medium to the city, with a view to a permanent exhibition opening there in spring 2012.