Elsa ‘Jack’ von Reppert-Bismarck, 1931 (Cecil Beaton)

(Time Magazine, Feb. 1931)  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.