Origins

Rauscher György (in Western order Gyorgy Rauscher; German-language sources Georg Rauscher; born Dorog, 29 April 1902; died Komárom, 3 October 1930), the painter of the new objectivity and, later, of Berlin’s galant world, was born in Dorog in Esztergom county on 29 April 1902, the eldest son of a Jewish-Hungarian physician’s family that moved to Komárom in 1903. He grew up inside the cultivated provincial bourgeoisie of a Danube town, and his gift for portraiture showed before he had any formal training.

Where was Rauscher born?

Rauscher was born in Dorog, where his father was then the mining-company physician at the coal works (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 5). This matters because the record was muddied early: the German-language Pester Lloyd, in its obituary of 7 October 1930, gave his birthplace as Kaposvár (/bibliography#pester-lloyd-1930-10-07). The Kaposvár attribution is an error. A portion of the painter’s later signed works carry the form dorogi Rauscher György (“Rauscher György of Dorog”), a deliberate gesture toward the birthplace (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 5).

In 1903 the family moved to Komárom, where Dr. Rauscher had been granted a medical practice; the honorary appointment as the town’s chief municipal medical officer came later, reported in the Komáromi Lapok of 29 March 1919 (/bibliography#komaromi-lapok-1919-03-29; /bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 5). Komárom was home from then on, and Rauscher would return to it for “the months of artistic recharge” all his short life (/venues/komarom).

The family

The Rauschers belonged to the provincial Hungarian-Jewish professional bourgeoisie. The father, Dr. Rauscher Zsigmond (Nyitra 1865 to Auschwitz 1944), had read medicine in Vienna; after retiring he ran a private clinic in the family house at Deák Ferenc utca 5, where the mother, Milch Emma (Komárom 1882 to Auschwitz 1944), kept a cosmetics salon (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 5). The maternal uncle Milch Ármin (1873-1922) was a Komárom timber merchant and archaeological collector who gave Roman finds to the municipal museum, which places the future painter inside a cultivated milieu well before he picked up a brush.

He had two younger brothers, both born in Komárom: László (1903-1997), who became custodian of the studio estate and whose bequest formed the core of the Klapka György Múzeum collection, and Ferenc (1908-1968), who survived the war as a forced labourer and emigrated to Israel in 1949 (the line through which the archive is stewarded; see /about). The family also had a literary connection that bears on the painter’s later sitters: the writer Zsolt Béla was a distant kinsman through the Milch line (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 19).

The family’s fate under the Holocaust, including the murder of both parents at Auschwitz in 1944, is held on the /holocaust-memorial page.

A precocious gift

Rauscher’s talent for portraiture was evident as a child. In 1912, aged ten, he won a prize at the school art exhibition at the Komárom Benedictine gymnasium, held 3-10 November, where his drawing master Harmos Károly showed his own work alongside his pupils’ (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 8). At sixteen he painted a three-quarter-length portrait of the Komárom county lord-lieutenant (főispán) F. Szabó Géza in díszmagyar, Hungarian gala dress, and it was hung in the assembly hall of the county hall. At seventeen his linocut illustrations appeared in the Komárom writer Tuba Károly’s poetry volume Megváltó viharban (“In the Redeeming Storm”) (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 8).

These are the first works of a portraitist. The formal grounding came next, under Harmos in Komárom and then at the academies of Vienna and Budapest.

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