Jack von Reppert-Bismarck

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).

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'.

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

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.

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

Von Reppert became a bit of an 'it' girl celebrity, as shown by the coverage given her by Weimar Republic era magazines such as Die Dame, Das Leben and UHU in the late 1920s. Subsequently, and concurrently she went to New York and England.

Elsa 'Jack' von Reppert-Bismarck, (1903 - 1971), painter ('neuen deutschen Frau' and kunstmalerin).

She was born Elisabeth Meyer, in Berlin on 10 February 1903 and died at Herkenrath near Cologne on 21 July 1971.