Annot Jacobi (1894 - 1981)

Still Life with Globe (Untitled), 1926, oil on canvas, signed and dated upper right, 29 x 20 inches, presented in a new frame

$6500

Annot Jacobi was a modernist painter. Born on December 27, 1894, in Berlin as Anna Ottilie Krigar-Menzel, to Otto Krigar-Menzel and Jacoba Elling, she came from an upper-class family of academics. Her father was a professor of theoretical physics at the university in Berlin and her mother a professional singer. Her godparents included the composer Johannes Brahms and the painter Adolph Menzel, who was also her great-uncle. She trained with Louis Corinth in Berlin and André Lhote in Paris, among others. Her oeuvre consists of portraits of workers, political activists, landscapes, nudes, and still lifes, such as the present example. Together with her husband Rudolf Jacobi, she opened a painting school in Berlin in 1928, the Malschule Annot. The same year, she became a member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund and Berliner Sezession, and she exhibited her work at galleries including Neumann-Nierendorf. She also exhibited at the Prussian Academy. During the low point of the Great Depression in Germany, Annot became known in the United States when one of her letters was published in a New Orleans newspaper, explaining how the young artist bartered her paintings in exchange for food, the other basic necessities of life, and even a holiday vacation. Displaced by the rise of National Socialism in Germany, Annot moved with her family to the United States by 1934 after having her work declared "degenerate" and refusing to dismiss her Jewish students.

Annot and her husband opened the Annot Art School and Gallery at Rockefeller Center in New York, where they showed the works of artists such as Katherine S. Dreier. During the 1930s and 1940s the Jacobis lived in New York and its environs, spending summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Annot won numerous awards, including a gold medal for her picture of Kathe Kruse and her children, at the 44th Annual Exhibition of Women Painters and Sculptors in New York City in 1935, after the same painting had been exhibited at the Carnegie Institute. She also exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, Salons of America, and Society of Independent Artists and she was a member of the New York Society of Woman Artists. Commercially, she had two-person shows, together with her husband, at Washington DC's Whyte Gallery, the Squibb Building Art Gallery, and Coulter Galleries, where a critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer noted, "she classes as an expressionist, although she expresses the meaning of her subject rather than herself. The paintings in the present exhibition are all of flowers, but the essence of flowers rather than their reality, and because of this, more intense in the living beauty of their colors." Annot also had a solo exhibition at Marie Sterner Gallery.

Annot also supported herself and her family by working as an interior designer. In addition to her studio art practice, Annot was a noted peace activist and spent much of her time during World War II in relief efforts. She returned to Germany in 1967, after living in Puerto Rico during parts of the prior decade. Annot is listed in Who Was Who in American Art and other standard references.