Eugène Gabritschevsky Russian nationality Born in Moscow in December 1893 Dies in the hospital of the district of Haar near Munich on April 5th, 1979

Eugène Gabritschevsky comes from a comfortable family of scientists from Imperial Russia. His father, a renown bacteriologist, worked with Pasteur in France and with Koch in Germany. In 1913, Eugène studies biology at the University of Moscow and specializes in problems of heredity. The first signs of a mental illness appear during the October Revolution. He finishes his studies successfully and goes into research. In 1924, he is invited to go to the United States. In 1926, he settles in Paris and continues doing research at the Pasteur Institute. At the age of thirty-three, he is world renowned for his knowledge on the laws of mutation in the lives of insects.

Everything changes though when he turns thirty-six. He is diagnosed with schizophrenia and hospitalized in a mental institution near Munich. During the next thirty years, Gabritschevsky will create an extraordinary body of work, thousands of paintings and drawings. "Gabritschevsky usually paints on both sides of discarded papers, such as old calendars, magazines or administrative memos. He creates his own technique by using a brush or his fingers, first spreading bright strips of color, then giving life to forms with a rag or a sponge." (Luc Debraine, Publications de la Collection de l'Art Brut, fascicule 16, p.26-28.) His first works look quite academic and are inspired by corals or human figures. They gradually become ghost looking silhouettes; large headed monsters with huge eyes, later little beings that look like mutants.

Luc Debraine notes that Gabritschevsky feels that the unexpected and the haphazard in art as well as in science are the basis of knowledge. Gabritschevsky turns away from the hazards of science in favor of those in art. Tortured by hallucinations and delirium, he reunites in many ways with great visionaries and authors of science fiction. As passionate readers of this genre, we would assume that Dr. Gabritschevsky, faced with the secrets of science, chooses to become a psychotic-irresponsible-traveling artist rather than a psychotic-doctor-Frankenstein, capable of creating one day transgenic chicken…

SEE ALSO: Publications de la Collection de l'Art Brut, fascicule 16, Lausanne, 1990.

...Return to index