When the German painter Neo Rauch was six weeks old, his parents left him with his grandparents and boarded a train to art school in Leipzig.
Within hours, the train had crashed, and their infant son was orphaned. Surrounded by their charcoal drawings, his earliest impulse was to create art.
"The artwork of my parents encircled me," said Mr. Rauch, now 54 years old, at his Leipzig studio. On the wall, a photograph of his mother watches over him, unable to answer a question that has always puzzled him: "How did they even pick 'Neo' as my name?"
Read more at The Wall Street Journal.