Caspar Walter Rauh
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Caspar Walter Rauh (13 October 1912 in Würzburg – 7 October 1983 in Kulmbach)[1] was a German graphic artist, illustrator and painter during the post-war period. He was part of the art movement known as Fantastic Realism.[2]
Rauh's father was a civil servant, and his mother came from a family of farm labourers. After the family moved to the town of Bayreuth he attended the Gymnasium (academic secondary school) there from 1923 on. In 1926 he joined the “Wandervogel” youth movement. Graduating from school in 1931, he began his studies at the art academy in Düsseldorf in 1932, attending lectures by Werner Heuser and Heinrich Nauen. Rauh was an enthusiastic admirer of the works of Alfred Kubin, Masereel and Cézanne. During the years 1934/35 he spent some months in Amsterdam, meeting former students of Paul Klee and Bauhaus. In 1936 he continued his studies at the academy in Leipzig under the supervision of Walter Tiemann. The following year he moved to Berlin, where he worked as a freelance artist and was employed by an advertising agency. He had his first exhibition at the Berlin gallery Zintl in 1939.
In the same year, immediately after his marriage, he was conscripted and sent to the Polish front as an infantryman. During the war his skills as a cartographer were discovered; he was deployed in France and Russia, and was briefly imprisoned at the end of the war. His family had been evacuated to the small Franconian village of Himmelkron during the war, and Rauh lived there with them under financially constrained circumstances from 1945 to 1955. To make ends meet, Rauh would sketch the houses of villagers, who often paid in natural produce for the drawings. In 1955 he moved to Kulmbach with his wife and two children, and lived there until his death in 1983.
From 1958 onwards, Rauh was a member of Fantasmagie, a Belgian-based movement to which representatives of Fantastic Realism from all over Europe subscribed. He regularly participated in exhibitions held by this and other groups, and eventually mounted a public exhibition devoted exclusively to his work. Caspar Walter Rauh died in Kulmbach on 7 October 1983.
