Jean Jacoby

Biography

In 1923 Jacoby’s drawing “Hurdle Runner” won the French newspaper L’Auto’s competition, the Concours de l’Auto. There were about four thousand rivals. It was his first wide fame.

He was born in Luxembourg on 26 March 1891. His father, Michel Jacoby, worked for the railway company CFL, whose headquarters were in Strasbourg. A year later the father was transferred to Molsheim in Alsace, and there the boy started primary school and grew up. Jacoby received his art education at the School of Fine Arts in Strasbourg. On 14 October 1912 he was issued a diploma as a teacher of drawing and painting for schools and lycées in Alsace-Lorraine; such work required German citizenship. In the same year he married Rose Richter, a native of Marburg. Of their three children, two died young.

Teaching did not appeal to him, and he remained a freelance artist. The sources differ on the details of these years: by some accounts he worked in 1912–1918 in a church in Wiesbaden, by others he taught drawing at the Lewin-Funcke school in Berlin and then worked in Wiesbaden. After that he returned to Strasbourg and took over the art department of a printing firm, where he also made newspaper illustrations.

In Paris in 1924 he won a gold medal in the painting category of the art competitions, for the triptych “Corner”, “Start”, “Rugby”. At the 1928 Games in Amsterdam, gold came for “Rugby” in the drawings and watercolours category. No other participant in these competitions held two Olympic golds.

In 1926 Jacoby moved to Berlin. There he worked as an illustrator and art director for two newspapers of the Ullstein publishing house, the Berliner Illustrierte and the Grüne Post, and became the person responsible for illustration at the firm. He chose artists and photographers according to their aptitudes. He himself most readily took on sport, especially football and athletics. His acquaintances included artists, actors and well-known sportsmen. As a member of a local artists’ association he regularly showed work at exhibitions in Bellevue Palace. In 1931 Ullstein launched the magazine Sieben Tage (“Seven Days”), a radio programme guide for the whole of Germany, and Jacoby became its illustrations editor; the circulation of what was the first home radio guide in Europe reached 300,000 copies.

At the 1932 Games he won no medal but received an honourable mention for the painting “Before the Goal”. Another honourable mention followed in 1936 for “Downhill (Skiing)”. The literary scholar Alexander Dolinin connected Jacoby’s painting “Football Match in Winter” with an episode in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “The Gift” (1938); it is supposed that the writer may have seen it in some football publication.

In 1933, after Hitler came to power, the position of the publishing house deteriorated sharply: its owner, Leopold Ullstein, was forced to give up the business because of “Aryanisation”, the Nazi programme of forcibly transferring Jewish-owned businesses. In 1934 Jacoby, with his second wife, Maria, née Kasteleiner, left Berlin for Mulhouse.

He died there on 9 September 1936. In Luxembourg, stamps for the 1952 Olympic Games were issued from his designs, and in 2016 he himself appeared on a postage stamp.