August 17, 2003|By Alec MacGillis | Alec MacGillis,SUN STAFF
Helen Levin Jacobson, an abstract-expressionist painter who figured prominently in the Baltimore art scene of the 1950s and 1960s, and taught art at local schools and Towson University, died Wednesday of respiratory failure at the Keswick Center. She was 89 years old.
After growing up near Druid Hill Park and attending Western High School, Mrs. Jacobson launched her career by winning a scholarship to what is now the Maryland Institute College of Art. For a time, she put her talents to use by working as an advertisement illustrator for local department stores.
FOR THE RECORD - An obituary in Sunday's editions for Helen Levin Jacobson omitted, in the list of survivors, her sister Gilda L. Abrahams of Baltimore. The Sun regrets the error.
As it turned out, those illustrations would be one of her last brushes with realism. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Mrs. Jacobson began taking classes with such well-known abstract artists as Morris Louis and quickly became a firm adherent to the colorist school of abstract expressionism.
By the mid-1950s, Mrs. Jacobson was showing in area galleries and winning praise from Sun art critic Kenneth B. Sawyer as "one of Baltimore's most imaginative and promising younger artists" and an "unusually keen craftsman."
In a 1955 review of a show at the Playhouse Theater on 25th Street, Mr. Sawyer described her pieces: "On meticulously brushed grounds Mrs. Jacobson adds an overlay of tense, angular forms, mazelike and contained. In the strangest of her oils she has eliminated the overlay and depends entirely on massed areas juxtaposed in gorgeous color parallels."
In 1958 came one of the high points of Mrs. Jacobson's career, a solo show at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where her work is now part of the permanent collection. A year later, she was the only Marylander to receive an invitation to show in the Art U.S.A., '59 show held in New York. There her work, in competition with artists from across the country, won one of the three regional prizes awarded at the show.
Mrs. Jacobson explained her preference for abstract painting in a 1960 interview with The Evening Sun: "I have nothing to say realistically in a painting that [photographer Henri] Cartier Bresson can't say more pungently with a camera," she said. Abstract painting, on the other hand, "is part of the long struggle toward the artist's expression of what he thinks and feels about life."
Mrs. Jacobson minced no words about those skeptical of the abstract work she and others were producing. "People who buy paintings which are representational in the camera sense are usually timid," she said. "They need to hold on to the real world. Space frightens them. They are afraid to spend time with it alone, afraid of their own thoughts and the unknown."
Despite her outspoken views on art, Mrs. Jacobson did not fit the stereotype of the bohemian modern painter, said her son, Alan Jacobson.
"She was actually very reserved and correct," said Jacobson, a Baltimore lawyer. "Politeness and almost Victorian behavior were very important to her."
Her son also recalled his mother's "distinctive dress style," typically black garments that highlighted her looks. Sun reporter Robert G. Breen noted the same thing on visiting Mrs. Jacobson at her Howard County home in 1959, where he described her as a "particularly beautiful woman distinguished by the uncanny faultlessness of her perfect grooming."
Mrs. Jacobson was married in 1934 to Milton W. Jacobson, a local businessman and art patron who died in 1995. They lived in Pimlico and then Forest Park before moving in 1958 to a new development that turned out to be in the middle of what would become the planned community of Columbia.
Together, the Jacobsons organized the Baltimore City Art Show at Druid Hill Reservoir, an annual event in the late 1950s and early 1960s and a precursor of the Artscape festival.
After teaching art at the Park School and in the public schools of Howard and Baltimore counties, Mrs. Jacobson joined the art faculty of what is now Towson University, from which she retired in 1975.
A lifelong Anglophile, Mrs. Jacobson made several trips to England via the Queen Elizabeth II and spent a sabbatical year studying at London University.
Though her art has been displayed in galleries and museums across the country and in Europe, Mrs. Jacobson sometimes wished that she had acquired greater notice for her work, her son said.
"She would have liked to have been discovered more," he said. "She had friends who moved to New York and did better there."
Art was not the only love of her life, though. Showing Mr. Breen her Howard County home in 1959, she told him she enjoyed gardening "more than anything else."
"But then again, it's the least competitive of all the arts," she said. "Today, you have to be a master of one-upmanship to get anywhere."
Services will be held at noon today at Sol Levinson & Bros. funeral home, 8900 Reisterstown Road in Pikesville.
In addition to her son, Mrs. Jacobson is survived by her daughter-in-law, Wanda Mathews Jacobson, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
