Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1940-10-01
Of Sturs, Men
And Atoms
Notebook Of Science Progress
In Field, Laboratory
And Study
BIZ Thomas r. Henry.

By Thomas r. Henry.
In a few weeks there will be placed In
the reception hall of st. Elizabeth's Hos
| pital weird, haunting picture.
1t is the portrait Of a fiendish face
such as might take shape out of the
clouds Of a nightmare or leer across
half million years from the days of the
manlike monsters of Ice Age rock
shelters.
The features are slashed, as If with q
knife.
For 10 years that portrait was priced
object of the art collection Of the Uni
versity of Heidelberg. to which it had
been given by the painter. Hitler's Ger
many had no further use for it-and
thereon hangs the strange story Of the
| pilgrimage of Gertrud Jacob as it Is
| told by her closest associate, DR.. Frieda
Fromm- Reichmann, Washington psy-
chiatrist
Gertrud Jacob was the daughter Of a
Jewish doctor in Kiel.
She was a precocious girl. In her early
20s she had built up wide reputation
as portrait painter and was well on
her way to becoming one of the most
eminent of the younger German artists.
But her faces were none too flattering
to her subjects. She was trying to catch
on canvas the lights and shadows of the
emotions-to paint not the faces them
selves but the sinister things they were
l. ! zs~~AI
in the ultramodern school of art. The
lights and shadows were fleeting. 1t was
close to impossible to paint portraits
which were more than pictures of the
masks men and women wore.
So the painter interrupted abruptly her
career as an artist to spend the better
part of her short life in an intensive
study Of what went on in the brain itself.
She devoted four years to the study Of
medicine and then specialized in psy-
chiatry-all with the purpose, at least in
the beginning, of becoming a better
artist.
She entered a weird, terrible shadow
land-the place Of the grotesque forms
of the hates, fears and passions out OF
ancient, animal days which are impris-
oned under the thinking layers Of mans
brain. They are the forms that emerge
in dreams or that people the worlds Of
mad men. Thus she developed the power,
which fellow psychiatrists say was
unique, of matching the turmoil within
to the features without.
1t was a long pilgrimage through the
roads Of purgatory for the tenderly
reared Jewish girl. 1t was hard jour-
ney She served the apprenticeship Of
an intern in German hospital for the
insane One day her job was the forced
feeding of a violent lunatic who was
dying of tuberculosis. In the struggle
she became infected with the deadly
malady.
Her apprenticeship over. Gertrud Jacob
began putting on canvas the faces of the
people of the purgatories she had ex-
plored.
She had studied said one of her later
associates, human emotions under
magnifying glass"
She painted the schizophrenic in the
depths of his utter, indescribable loneli-
ness, the paranoic pursued by flendish
voices of doom, the paresis victim in his
world of lust, hate and cunning. There
is a curious quality about her pictures,
say her associates. Some of the most
eminent of American psychiatrists who
have looked at them have been able TO
diagnose the conditions and also, in a
few cases, actually describe the case
histories of the men and women as
accurately as if they had been reported
in words.
Looking at these faces, they see: they
seem to have strange sort of clairvoy-
ance. DR.. Jacob put into them more
than she knew. She herself was
astounded at some of the facts, found
later to check with the actual case his
tories. read into the paintings by other
psychiatrists
BY that time she was making good
living as practicing pSychiatrist and
soon became known as one of the lead
ing specialists in one branch of psy-
| chiatry in Germany. Art was in danger
Of becoming the relaxation of a busy
physician. Most of her pictures she kept.
| A few she gave away to German institu-
| lions with which she was associated
including the ancient University OF
Heidelberg.
Then, in 1888, came Hitler. DR.. Jacob,
together with many others Of the most
eminent Jewish physicians in Germany.
read the handwriting on the wall. AL
though she was not actually subjected to
| any persecution, she realized that 1t was
| only a matter of time until she would be
forced to leave.
After a short stay in France she went
| to the Jewish University in Palestine.
| There she became an artist again, and
| her painting took on different tone.
She painted the Dead Sea In calm and
| storm, and pastoral scenes of Jewish
| and Arabian villages.
After a year Gertrud Jacob resumed
her pilgrimage. The deadly tuberculosis
was sapping her strength. Accompanied
by DR.. Fromm- Reichmann she came to
| the United States. Arriving here in 1885
she served on stats of several psychiat.ic
hospitals, until her illness forced her to
go to the artists colony at Santa Fe,
| N. Mex.-following the steps of her fellow
tuberculosis victim, character painter in
words, and psychoanalyst, D. H. Law
renee.