Caspar Walter Rauh

Already during the war, Rauh was working on ink drawings in small formats which drew on a repertoire of phantasmagorical images rich in symbols. The shock and terror of the war was a point of departure for Rauh's artistic productions during the post-war period. In 1947 he published a folder with 16 ink drawings. Shortly afterwards the volume Niemandsland (No Man's Land) was published in a subsidised print run of 10,000 copies. It contains 48 ink drawings accompanied by 48 short but distinctive texts. Its imagery – inspired by surrealism and phantasmagorical drawing – depicts the war as an apocalypse that has created a no man's land within which humanist values have been marginalised.

More or less simultaneously, Rauh was working on a second project entitled Traumland (Dreamland), but this volume was not published until 1993, when it was released as part of his bequest. In contrast to Niemandsland the ink drawings in Traumland are coloured throughout and the imagery leans more strongly towards the humorous, idyllic and bizarre. Rauh himself describes it as an attempt to “soar above misery while dreaming and construct a world in its own right – a magic garden”. The differences between the two collections illustrate a tension that goes right through Rauh's later works: between the unstinting illustration of barbarity and destruction on the one hand, and the quest for fantastic imagination, irony and burlesque on the other hand.

After a short engagement with abstraction during the fifties, in which he chiefly worked in mixed media, Rauh returned to Fantastic Realism with its potential for humour and revulsion. Although he increasingly worked in larger formats, the main focus of his artistic production was still on small formats – ink drawings and above all engravings. From 1958 onwards he regularly produced folders of hand-produced etchings printed and sold by Rauh himself.

Watercolours (also involving ink draughtsmanship) constituted an important second sphere of activity which, while present since the fifties, intensified after 1970. The watercolours are chiefly depicting landscapes, but run the gamut from “real” landscape drawing to imaginative scenarios exploiting surreal figurations.

Illustrations of literary works opened up a third line of activity for Rauh. His marked preference for the classics of fantastic literature is recognisable in his illustrations of works and productions written by Edgar Allan Poe, Jean Paul and E.T.A. Hoffmann. In addition, Rauh worked as an illustrator of children's books, providing ink drawings for the German edition of three novels in Mary Norton’s series The Borrowers. In addition, he produced numerous works based on motifs taken from the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers and others.

Rauh's interest in fairy tales is also documented by his own literary productions. Between 1950 and 1955 he wrote 33 short fairy tales which were broadcast by Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bavarian Radio) and published in German daily newspapers.

It was initially in order to provide a financial income for his family that Rauh accepted a number of commissions involving the composition of large-scale glass mosaics for building projects. Examples of this work can mainly be seen in the region of Upper Franconia. A well-known example can be seen on an electric transformer in Kulmbach – the “Transformatorenhäuschen” depicts the animals of the African savannah. However, in his brief autobiographical sketch Curriculum Vitae, Rauh described these commissioned works as “unsatisfactory".

The C.W Rauh bequest, comprising a significant collection of Rauh's drawings, engravings and paintings as well as his entire studio materials, is on permanent loan to the Oberfrankenstiftung (Culture Foundation of Upper Franconia) and is housed at the art museum (Kunstmuseum) in Bayreuth.