Training

Rauscher’s training ran from a Komárom drawing class to the academies of Vienna and Budapest and on to the studios of Paris. He took his grounding under Harmos Károly, studied at the Vienna Academy in 1920-21 and at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts under Réti István in 1921-23, won an early prize in 1922, and then made the grand tour of his generation, to Italy in 1923 and Paris from 1925. The decisive influence of these years was not a teacher but a room of pictures in Vienna.

Komárom: Harmos and Komáromi Kacz

Rauscher took his graphic and painterly grounding at the Benedictine főgimnázium in Komárom under Harmos Károly (1879-1956), who taught there from 1911 and had himself trained at the Budapest drawing school under Székely Bertalan and in Munich under Anton Ažbe and Franz von Stuck (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 7). In the school holidays he took additional tuition from Komáromi Kacz Endre (1880-1969), the established Komárom portrait painter (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 7). Both men anchored the Komárom art circle, the Jókai Egyesület’s fine-arts section (JESZO), in which Rauscher would show his early work.

Vienna and Budapest

After matriculation he enrolled at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna in 1920-21, then transferred to the Országos M. Kir. Képzőművészeti Főiskola (the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts) in 1921-23, into the figure-painting class of Réti István (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 8). His presence is confirmed independently by the academy’s 1921-25 yearbook, which lists him among the regular students in the painting course. His classmates included Gadányi Jenő, Miháltz Pál, Szolnay Sándor, Bene Géza, Román György, Ruttkay György, and the Komárom-connected Basilides Sándor.

In 1922 he won the Szinyei Társaság prize for his canvas Tanulmányfej (Study Head), which he showed in 1923 at the academy students’ exhibition at the Ernst Múzeum (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 8).

Italy, Paris, and a film cameo

After graduating he travelled. Italy came first, in 1923; in the autumn and winter of 1924 he was in Paris assisting the painter Paizs Goebel Jenő, and from early 1925 he settled in Paris (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 9). In 1926-27 he lived in Budapest with a studio at Eskü tér, spending school holidays at the family’s Beöthy villa studio in Komárom. The specific contacts and sitters of the Italian and Parisian years are not preserved; what survives is the stylistic outcome.

One film-world episode belongs to this threshold period: in 1921 Rauscher played a small role, “Józsi,” in the Hungarian silent film Ilona, opposite the actress Lia de Putti, whose portrait he would later paint (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 33; see /sitters/putty-lia).

The Vienna museums and the seed of a style

The strongest single influence of the training years was a room rather than a teacher. Számadó identifies the painter’s encounter in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum with Schiele, Klimt, and Brueghel’s Téli vadászat (Winter Hunt) as the seed of his turn to the new objectivity (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 17). Out of Vienna and post-Cubist Paris came the closed, plastic forms with hard contours that would define his mature work. That turn, and the reading of it, belong to the next chapter.

Previous: Origins. Next: The Hungarian years.