The Hungarian years

Around 1925 György Rauscher turned to új tárgyiasság (New Objectivity / Neue Sachlichkeit), the closed, plastic, hard-contoured manner he was among the first Hungarian painters to adopt, and over the next three years he built a Budapest reputation as a portraitist of the literary and bourgeois world. He showed at the Tavaszi Szalon in 1926 and in a six-artist group exhibition at the Ernst Múzeum in 1927, exhibited regularly with the KUT, and drew the notice of the period press, which found him as unsettling as it found him gifted. This chapter is the archive’s account of that style and that reading; other pages refer here rather than re-explain it.

What is új tárgyiasság (New Objectivity)?

New Objectivity (in German Neue Sachlichkeit, in Hungarian új tárgyiasság) was the post-Expressionist turn of the mid-1920s toward sober, sharply defined, often coldly observed figuration, named by the critic Gustav Hartlaub in 1925 and theorised the same year by Franz Roh as Nachexpressionismus / Magischer Realismus. In painting it meant closed contours, plastic modelling, and a deliberate, sometimes disquieting clarity, in reaction against Expressionist looseness. Rauscher arrived at it early. The Magyar Életrajzi Lexikon records that “his pictures reflect the spirit of the Neue Sachlichkeit” and that he was “among the first Hungarian initiators” of the style; the 1935 Művészeti Lexikon of Éber László had already called him “egyike volt a legelsőknek,” one of the very first (/bibliography#eber-1935).

In his own words, from his 1927 Ernst Múzeum exhibition statement:

„Legszínesebb színeim is szürkék… Festeni csak úgy tudok, ahogy látok és ahogy érzek. Érezni pedig nem a nyers erőt, hanem a túlfinomult elnőiesedett formákat érzem, melyek karakterét keresve, vagy felfokozom, vagy elfinomítom, hogy belőlük intenzíven és azonnal érezhetővé váljék az élet teljessége.”

“Even my most colourful colours are grey… I can only paint as I see and as I feel. And what I feel is not raw force, but the over-refined, feminized forms, whose character I seek out and either heighten or refine, so that through them the fullness of life becomes intensely and immediately perceptible.” (Rauscher György, artist’s statement, Ernst Múzeum exhibition catalogue, September 1927; quoted in /bibliography#galig-2013 and used as the back-cover epigraph of /bibliography#szamado-2019.)

Three subjects

Within these years, Számadó groups the work by subject into three kinds (/bibliography#szamado-2019, pp. 17-21):

• People on the margins of society: beggars and outsiders, the Idióta (Idiot) and the young Talmudist of the Talmudista (also titled Merengő zsidó, Pensive Jew), portraits in which the sitter’s inner life matters more than outward likeness.
• The cultivated middle class: writers, artists, and intellectuals, among them Szomory Dezső, Zsolt Béla, Vaszkó Ödön, Reiter László, and Polgár Boriska.
• The world of the night: bars, jazz, passion, and mourning, in Apacstanya (Apache Den), Jazz-band, Halotti tor (Funeral Feast), and Szerelmespár (Lovers).

A reading of the sources

The fullest reading of where Rauscher’s manner came from is Gálig Zoltán’s, and the archive attributes it to him rather than to Számadó, who names a narrower set. Gálig traces an Austrian connection that “the Rauscher literature never once mentions,” to Franz Sedlacek, and finds in Egon Schiele’s dissecting line the template for Rauscher’s elongated hands and torqued postures; he argues that where Rauscher’s Hungarian contemporaries set out from Cézanne, Rauscher drew more from Van Gogh (/bibliography#galig-2013).

Rauscher himself, in the 1927 catalogue, named Modigliani, Fujita, and Schrimpf. For the German New Objectivity proper, Gálig invokes Grosz, Dix, and Davringhausen for the narrow, stage-like space of the Talmudista; for the later art-deco synthesis he points to Tamara de Lempicka and Jeanne Mammen.

The Budapest exhibitions and the press

Rauscher first drew sustained notice at the Szinyei Társaság’s Tavaszi Szalon of May-June 1926. Magyar Grafika introduced him on 1 March 1926:

„Egy feltűnően tehetséges fiatal művésszel ismerkedtünk meg a kiállításon és ez: Rauscher György. Éles szobrászi mintázás, kevés, tiszta szín, a jellegzetes merész, majdnem karikaturisztikus kiemelése fokozott elevenséget kölcsönöznek művészetének.”

“At this exhibition we have come to know a strikingly talented young artist: Rauscher György. A sharp sculptural modelling, few and pure colours, a characteristically bold, almost caricature-like emphasis lend his art a heightened vivacity.” (/bibliography#magyar-grafika-1926-03-01)

In March 1927 he took an honourable mention at the second Szinyei Társaság Tavaszi Szalon. In September 1927 he showed sixteen pictures in a group exhibition at the Ernst Múzeum, alongside Derkovits Gyula, Molnár C. Pál, Simon György János, Cselényi Walleshausen Zsigmond, and the sculptor Kósa Mária. This was a six-artist group show, not a solo retrospective, despite the Magyar Életrajzi Lexikon’s later use of the word gyűjteményes; the correction is one the archive carries (see /exhibitions/1927-ernst-muzeum). The Pesti Hírlap of 11 September 1927 called his work “almost ascetically cold” (/bibliography#pesti-hirlap-1927-09-11), and Rabinovszky Márius, in Nyugat, gave the period’s sharpest verdict:

„Rauscher György e kiállításon látható képein expresszionista torzítást plasztikus zártsággal, árnyalatgazdagságot helyi-színkezeléssel egyesít. Kifejezésben emellett megdöbbentően dekadens; megdöbbentően, mert szuggesztív művészi ereje igen nagy.”

“Rauscher fuses expressionist distortion with plastic closure and tonal richness with local-colour treatment. In expression he is moreover startlingly decadent; startlingly so, because his suggestive artistic power is very great.” (/bibliography#nyugat-1927-05-01)

He was by now a regular exhibitor with the KUT (Képzőművészek Új Társasága), and in March 1928 a solo show at the Deutsches Künstlerhaus in Brünn (Brno) sold almost every work and brought portrait commissions (/bibliography#komaromi-lapok-1928-03-13; /exhibitions/1928-brno-deutsches-kunstlerhaus). That success was the threshold to Berlin.

Previous: Training. Next: The Berlin years.