New Jack

Last week at New York's Balzac Galleries, Frau Jack von Reppert-Bismarck was heralded as a great-granddaughter-in-law of the Iron Chancellor's cousin, and also as Germany's Marie Laurencin.

The comparison with Laurencin is superficially apt. Both artists, charming personally, paint delicate, decadent little girls. With extreme freedom of line, the work of both is eminently suitable for arty magazines. Both have the trick of inserting self portraits in most of their pictures. But Marie Laurencin is 45, red haired, very much a woman of the world, served a long painstaking art apprenticeship before her paintings caught the public fancy. Jack von Reppert-Bismarck is bashful, blonde and 22, looks about 15, and is something of a child prodigy.

She was christened Elsa von Wenden, began drawing at the age of three, illustrated the Bible and Oliver Twist (as told by her sister) at six. At 17 she married Jorg von Reppert-Bismarck, not many years her elder, whose great-grandfather was the great Bismarck's first cousin. Her husband gave her the nickname "Jack" which she signs to all her paintings, and which he pronounces "Jake."

"I called her Jake," he explained seriously last week in his best English, "because she look like Jakey Coogan."

Last week Frau Jack and husband arrived in New York, for her first visit to the U. S., the first trip she had ever made outside Germany and Austria. To a circle of beaming, embarrassed reporters she showed her paintings, posed for photographs, and played her English lessons--a set of phonograph records from which a very cultivated British voice slowly enunciated: "The grandfather is sitting in an easy chair. The grandmother is also sitting in an easy chair." etc. Very much in the background was childlike Frau Jack's quiet husband. An active stage designer, he carried in his pocket a contract to do a series of articles, crayon portraits of U. S. gangsters for the Berlin magazine Detectif. With a sound working knowledge of grandfather sitting in his easy chair and other useful phrases, Herr Bismarck was eager last week for a personal interview with Al Capone.

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