Jeannette Gelb (1906-1978) was the oldest of Louis and Sarah Gelb’s five children. Although the Gelbs lived initially in Manhattan, the family settled in West Haven, Connecticut, where Louis was a door-to-door salesman. Gelb attended the School of Art at Yale University, graduating in 1927. She moved to New York to continue art studies at the Art Students League while supporting herself as a public-school teacher. Although she took painting and life classes, she developed a primary focus on etching with Eugene Fitsch and George Picken. Her prints from the 1930s represent cityscapes, portraits, and scenes of laborers, and by the 1940s her style became deeply influenced by surrealism and dream imagery. Gelb was always intellectually curious and developed a particular interest in psychoanalysis, the profession of her youngest brother, Lester. She produced a series of dream-inspired etchings, printed in relief with black ink, while working at Atelier 17 in the late 1940s. Gelb’s mature prints, made from the 1950s until the early 1970s, are fully abstract but still closely linked to nature and particularly her favorite place, the dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Boris Margo, maintained a beach shack. Likely through the influence of Margo, creator of the cellocut, she devised new methods for achieving textural effects on these abstract intaglio plates including spraying them with lacquer from aerosol cans or scratching them with granular materials such as sugar or carborundum. Gelb exhibited her paintings and prints often and had solo shows at galleries such as Delphic Studios (1940), Weyhe Gallery (1948, 1950), and Ruth White Gallery (several between 1957 and her death).
Jan Gelb
Studios
Mixter
Jan Gelb worked in the Mixter studio.
Built in 1927–1930, the Florence Kilpatrick Mixter Studio was funded by its namesake and designed by the architect F. Winsor, Jr., who also designed MacDowell's original Savidge Library in 1925. Mixter Studio, solidly built of yellow and grey-hued granite, once had sweeping views of Pack Monadnock to the east. The lush forest has now grown…