Jack von Reppert-Bismarck

The Balzac Galleries, on 449 Park Avenue, 102 East 57 Street, held an exhibition of her paintings from February 10 to 28 February 1931.^[4]

One report on 22 Feb 1931 read: At the Balzac galleries a lady who calls herself Jack von Reppert-Bismarck, holds forth with a large show of paintings and drawings... In the current exhibition at the Balzac Galleries the face of a fat clown. the red ears of the blue frocked barker of the Cirque d'hiver, the rush of white horses, the stab of an out-thrust hand are set down with swift singing color and an unswerving line.

TIME: Monday, February 23, 1931, continued: 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 [28], looks about 15, and is something of a child prodigy.

During the Friday to Monday (weekend) of May 29, 1932, Cecil Beaton, whom Jack had met in New York, on the wet Sunday set his house party the task of decorating his bedroom. Beaton wrote that the 'room was to be painted in garish colours with niches filled with circus performers, with baroque emblems, barley-sugar poles and flowered mirrors'.^[5]

Rex Whistler, Jack and her husband Jörg (Yorck) von Reppert-Bismarck, Oliver Messel, Lord Berners, Christopher Sykes and Beaton himself set to. Jack's piece, the equestrienne, is almost the only element to survive.^[6] Siegfried Sassoon and Edith Olivier were also of the party but did not join in the painting.

Beaton's description of the transformation of his bedroom into a circus-room ends thus:

'Mme von Bismarck pictured an equestrienne on a flower-dappled circus pony, and her husband decided to portray 'the strong man of the Fair' with volute mustachios, tattoo marks, heavy ball-weights and chains. However, Yorck Bismarck eschewed the traditional circus manner of carefully finished realistic painting for the more modern slapdash strokes of the brush, and the next weekend, Rex Whistler could not resist touching up the flowing chevelure and mustachios, the better to conform with the other murals. 'Please don't, Rex' I pleaded. 'There'll be hell to pay if Yorck ever discovered you've touched the thing'. But the temptation was too great. Rex was unable to resist repainting, meticulously and realistically, the crisply waving hair, the mustachios, then of course, the column-like throat, the brawny chest, and so on down the whole over-muscular body. Unfortunately, it so happened that the Bismarcks drove over from Biddesden [ home to Bryan Guinness ] the following Sunday to admire their handiwork. Although my strong man had been made into a work of art, the Bismarck's were enraged at the indignity committed upon the 'strong man', and a nasty situation was created in the artistic world of which reverberations were heard for many weeks to come.'^[7]

• Drawings for Für Liebende by Jeanne Ramel-Cals, Kindt & Bucher, Gießen, 1931;
• Lillian Gish, 1931, drawing, pastel on paper, (26" x 19"), National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Estate of Lillian Gish. NPG.95.191;
• Portrait of Cecil Beaton, as shown in New York in Vogue, April 15, 1932;^[8]
• Boys Smoking, 1931, gift of the Balzac Galleries, New York, 1931 to the Detroit Institute of the Arts, (Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of the Arts, February 1932, XIII, vol. 5, page 61). Pen and black ink and watercolor on cream wove paper. Sheet: 7 3/4 × 5+1⁄2 inches; Accession number: 31.57;^[9]
• Circus Room mural, figure on an horse, equestrienne, Ashcombe House, Wiltshire, May 1932;
• Cover drawing for Lyrische Novelle by Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Berlin, Rowohlt Verlag, 1933;
• Portrait of John Julius Norwich, dated 25 February 1933, oil on canvas, 30 x 25 inches, ex. collections: Lady Diana Cooper and Lady Katharine Mary Veronica Farrell (1922-2017).^[10]
• Cover and illustrations for Mechtilde Lichnowsky's novel "Kindheit", Berlin, 1934, lettering by George Salter;
• Colour drawings for Sylvia. Eine Erzählung, by Pfeiffer-Belli, Rowohlt, Berlin, 1936;
• Krönungssommer [Coronation Summer], Prinzessin Elisabeth von England, 1937. Painting of Her Majesty hugging Jane or Dookie, one of Queen Elizabeth's corgis, reproduction published in Die Dame, Heft (issue) 10, 64. May 1, 1937.
• Five colour lithographs for Ein Sommernachtstraum. Eine Komödie, by William Shakespeare, Bern Scherz, c.1950;
• Five lithographs for Iwan Turgenjew's Erste Liebe, Berne, 1958.

Elsa married the painter (kunstmaler) Hans Jörg Yorck Friederich Karl Bernhard von Reppert-Bismark (1902-1962) in Berlin on 9 January 1926.^[12] Jörg von Reppert-Bismarck illustrated Edward James's Reading Into the Picture, (published by Duckworth), 1934.^{[citation needed]}

During WW2 he was an Axis war artist covering at least a unit of Cossacks with in the Wehrmacht in the East, as seen both German and Italian versions of the Wehrmacht magazine Signal, 1943 (number 21).^[13]