György Rauscher: a life

Rauscher György (in Western order Gyorgy Rauscher; German-language sources Georg Rauscher; born Dorog, 29 April 1902; died Komárom, 3 October 1930) was a Hungarian painter of the new objectivity (új tárgyiasság / Neue Sachlichkeit) and, in his Berlin years, of art deco society portraiture.

In a working life of barely a decade, he was among the first Hungarian painters to take up the New Objectivity manner and built a Budapest reputation as a portraitist of the literary and bourgeois world.

In Berlin he became a society portraitist and a sought-after illustrator for Scherl Verlag, painting Marlene Dietrich, Lilian Harvey, and Elisabeth Bergner before tuberculosis killed him at twenty-eight.

This is the overview. The life is told in full across five chapters, and dated in the timeline.

The life in brief

Rauscher was the eldest son of a Jewish-Hungarian physician’s family that moved from Dorog to Komárom in 1903. His gift for portraiture showed early: a school prize at ten, a formal portrait of the county lord-lieutenant at sixteen, published linocuts at seventeen (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 8). He trained under Harmos Károly in Komárom, at the Vienna Academy in 1920-21, and at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts under Réti István in 1921-23, and then travelled to Italy and Paris (/bibliography#szamado-2019, pp. 8-9).

The decisive turn came around 1925, when he took up the firm outlines and solid, sculptural forms of the new objectivity. The Magyar Életrajzi Lexikon would later place him “among the first Hungarian initiators” of the style.

In Budapest in 1926-27 he showed at the Tavaszi Szalon and in a 1927 group exhibition at the Ernst Múzeum, and the period press took notice. Magyar Grafika called him “a strikingly talented young artist,” and Rabinovszky Márius, writing in Nyugat, found him “startlingly decadent … because his suggestive artistic power is very great” (/bibliography#nyugat-1927-05-01).

After a 1928 solo show in Brünn (Brno), Rauscher moved to Berlin. There he won the Sport im Bild cover competition, took a permanent contract with Scherl Verlag, and painted the celebrities of the film and theatre world. Late in 1929 he moved to Nice and then Paris. In 1930 he returned to Hungary, painted his last portrait, and died of tuberculosis in Komárom on 3 October, twenty-eight years old.

The fullest view of his work is the 1935 Nemzeti Szalon estate exhibition, whose 118-work catalogue is the canonical record of the oeuvre and is reproduced here as a navigable document. That catalogue, with more than two dozen further documented works, is the oeuvre the archive counts; the “around two hundred” often cited was a contemporaries’ estimate of his total output, most of it now untraced (/methodology). The reviewer in Pesti Hírlap, Fóthy János, caught the tension of the Berlin work in a sentence that has followed Rauscher ever since: “sometimes only a hair separates it from fashionable kitsch, but that hair is never missing” (/bibliography#pesti-hirlap-1935-10-26).

When Rauscher died, Lyka Károly wrote the touchstone obituary in Magyar Művészet:

„…képein és rajzain nem annyira a formai megoldást, mint inkább a kifejezést kereste. … lelkiséget, érzelmi elemeket akart azokba bevinni.”

“In his pictures and drawings he sought not so much formal solutions as expression. He wanted to bring into them an inner life, emotional elements.” (/bibliography#lyka-1930)

The five chapters

1. Origins: Dorog and Komárom, the family, and a precocious gift.
2. Training: Harmos, Vienna, Budapest under Réti, and the journey to Italy and Paris.
3. The Hungarian years: the turn to New Objectivity and the Budapest exhibitions.
4. The Berlin years: Scherl Verlag, Sport im Bild, and the celebrity sitters.
5. Final months and afterlife: Nice, Paris, the last portrait, his death, and the posthumous record.

Next: Origins.