Leo Rauth (1884-1913) - Venise de nuit

German painter and graphic artist, successively trained in Leipzig, Karlsruhe, Berlin and Munich, in Franz von Stuck’s class, Leo Rauth belongs to the generation that, on the eve of World War I, renewed figurative painting through an increased attention to artificial light, the decorative, and urban modernity. After study stints in Paris and Venice, he quickly established himself on the Leipzig art scene from 1909, before his premature death in 1913.
The Night View of Venice is set in a context in which the lagoon city constitutes a major motif of European painting, perceived both as a place of memory, of theater, and of pictorial experimentation. At the turn of the 20th century, Venice by night concentrates research on light effects, the reflections on the water, and the transformation of urban space by modern lighting, themes shared by many artists coming from late Symbolism and the decorative movements.
This work holds particular importance in Rauth’s body of work insofar as it transposes, outside the world of carnival and performance, his essential concerns about the staging of light and atmosphere. The Venetian subject allows him to fuse iconographic tradition with modern sensibility, in keeping with the expectations of an era fascinated by historic cities reinterpreted through the prism of modernity. It thus testifies to Rauth’s involvement in the contemporary artistic debates around the nocturne, perception, and the city as an autonomous pictorial motif.
A member of the Leipziger Secession and the Deutscher Künstlerbund, Rauth developed a rare body of work, today little represented on the market, of which this painting constitutes a significant milestone in understanding his artistic stance within German painting of the years 1900–1910.