Eugen Gabritschevsky (1893–1979) was born in Moscow to a family of civil officials and diplomats. His father—the eminent bacteriologist Georg Norbert Gabritschevsky—was part of the team that discovered the scarlet fever vaccine. With his four siblings, Gabritschevsky lived at his maternal uncle’s home, where prominent Russian figures and celebrities, such as Leo Tolstoy, often visited. Private teachers introduced him to the humanities, philosophy, law, languages, and the arts. Summertime was spent at the grandfather’s vast countryside estate, where the study of flora and fauna was part of Gabritschevsky’s daily regimen. His brother Georg noted his precocious interest in insects, “which he observed and whose mysteries he seemed to have a special power to penetrate. He understood from the outset that mutation was something important in the life of insects. As a young boy, he carried out clever experiments in the forest, beginning with very naive ones on ants and stinkbugs. He turned them over, fed them, and became one with nature.”

In 1917, in the middle of the Russian Revolution, Gabritschevsky completed a graduate degree in biology at the University of Moscow, where he specialized in genetics—a science then only in its infancy—and in hereditary problems, with concentrations in embryology, histology, and the anatomy of vertebrates and invertebrates. Up to 1924, he was a part-time lecturer in zootomy and contributed to the Russian journal of zoology, Zoologicheskii zhurnal, which published his study on the effect of light beams on the coloration of butterfly chrysalides. His professor at the Institute of Comparative Anatomy described him as a remarkable, independent student. In 1925, he was awarded a scholarship to pursue postdoctoral studies at Columbia University in New York, under the supervision of the future Nobel laureate, professor Thomas Hunt Morgan, who wrote that Gabritschevsky’s application stood out and “indicates a man of unusual capacity.” In April 1927, he moved to Paris where he joined the Pasteur Institute and published lauded essays on the genetic mutations of insects.

In 1931, Gabritschevsky’s enviable career was cut short by the deterioration of his mental health, which led to his admission to the Eglfing-Haar Psychiatric Hospital in Germany. He was thirty-eight years old. There, he devoted himself for the next fifty years to the creation of a profuse and sophisticated body of work that included more than three thousand gouaches, drawings, and watercolors on paper. Gabritschevsky’s artistic contribution is imbued with his early scientific interests. His observation skills and propensity for experimentation are evident in the diversity of his oeuvre. This art, Gabritschevsky wrote in 1948, can be seen as the “way of transcending distress at the finiteness of scientific knowledge.”

Adapted from Valérie Rousseau, “Eugen Gabritschevsky: Morphology of the Imperceptible,” in Eugen Gabritschevsky, 1893–1979 (New York/Paris/Lausanne/Ghent: American Folk Art Museum/la maison rouge/Collection de l’Art Brut/Snoeck, 2016)

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated with new research. Records are reviewed and revised, and the American Folk Art Museum welcomes additional information.　

To help improve this record, please email photoservices@folkartmuseum.org