1512921719Eugen Gabritschevsky18931979Although many of Eugen Gabritschevsky’s earliest artworks reflect the observation skills that he had nurtured as a scientist, over time they became more untethered from reality. Yet they often seem to channel ideas from his research into biological mutation, with portrayals of otherworldly creatures with huge heads and eyes and of fantastic animal or human hybrids, usually made in gouache or watercolor on paper. These were given further complexity in their composition through a variety of methods, including those associated with surrealism, such as frottage, the rubbing technique pioneered by Max Ernst, and grattage, the scratching of the page. He finished these pieces with even more detail, sometimes patterns stamped with a sponge or additions in pencil or brush. Gabritschevsky was born in 1893 into a well-off family in Imperial Russia; his father was a respected bacteriologist. An early passion was insects; he also frequently sketched, as his brother Georges later put it, “mysterious forms [he had] seen in his dreams.” In 1913 he went to study at the University of Moscow, where he concentrated on biology and the emerging field of genetics. His research led to invitations to Columbia University in New York in 1925 and the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1927. He became particularly recognized for his investigations into how insects transmit colors and color patterns. This thriving career was derailed when a decline in his mental health led to his commitment to the Eglfing-Haar Psychiatric Hospital near Munich, Germany, in 1931, where he would spend the rest of his life. His body of work includes thousands of drawings, watercolors, and gouaches, mostly created during his decades in the hospital, with X-ray paper and magazine pages serving as surfaces. He stated in a 1946 letter, “I managed to produce drawings that represented death, sorrow, the emotions, the comic life of souls and elements, the earth, the impossibility of happiness, the strange states of the soul . . .” By the time he died, in 1979, his work had received attention amidst the burgeoning interest in art brut, including from Jean Dubuffet. (This recognition of his art by French collectors and gallery owners would lead to his regularly being referred to as “Eugène Gabritchevsky.”) In 2017, the American Folk Art Museum held a major exhibition of his work in collaboration with La Maison Rouge in Paris and the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland. Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).EugenGabritschevskyhttps://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/13438/fullEugen 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)In 1917, in the middle of the Russian Revolution, Eugen 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.Nature, in its broadest sense, remained the core reference of his oeuvre—which exponentially developed after his permanent admission to the Eglfing-Haar Psychiatric Hospital in Germany at the age of thirty-eight. Though unusually diverse, his body of work still employed dominant motifs: wide, placid, amphibian-looking faces; creatures evoking the mystical relationship of man with spiritual forces of nature like this female nude with red hair, lying in front of a rolled parchment covered with hieroglyphics and a pair of wings; serial studies of birds, snakes, and butterflies; and finally, as seen in a second artwork, these ectoplasmic beings who appear to be ceaselessly growing and multiplying, in which yellow and gray shapeless figures with changing facial expressions unfold on a bright-red-toned abstract landscape.Gabritschevsky used his fingers and brushes to spread his colors, combining different methods—rubbing, scratching, transfer printing—conducive to the creation of suggestive forms that he accentuated at a later stage with a pencil or a pointy tool. (1893–1979)Haar MoscowHaar MoscowHaar MoscowEugène GabritschevskyEugen GabritschevskyEvgenij Georgievič Gabričevskij