At The Washington Printmakers Gallery, February 20th - March 25th
1732 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington DC

by Andrea M. Leopold

Great art is ambivalent and leaves the viewer with a permanent impression. Pauline Jakobsberg's powerful prints, full of tenderness, caring and humanity balanced with pathos and grief meet those standards. Inspired by her memory drawings, journal sketches, artifacts and family tales told by her grandmother and her husband's family's holocaust survivors, she creates art that leaves sweet, yet haunting memories, making her visions a reality. By incorporating images from photographs and other documents into her etched prints, she develops a story, reminding us of our inability to grasp our past completely - giving universality to her personal history and unique talent.

Working in an environmentally safe studio, using acid free etching techniques, she etches, silk screens and employs chine collé on her handmade and Japanese paper, creating dense overlays of images that recreate the complexity of accumulated memories. Repetitive use of background drawings, metaphors of heavy block walls, old letters, or photographs, and the repetition of images leave an impression filled with meaning - too difficult to forget. There is much pathos in a nine-frame print of a gentle face, Birthrights Left Behind, where his eyes change from nonchalance to fear to the blank stare of someone refusing to see the chaos and despair. Echoes of shapes in Changing Tides represent the historical changes leading up to a dictator's rise, while Old Europe dates from before the turn of the 20th century. Boardwalk Sabbath is from an affectionate memory drawing of the artist's parents and Pen Pals represents her mother's own memorabilia.

Jakobsberg believes that creating images of people now gone or maybe never known, renews their lives in her mind and gives substance to their memory. Her recent shows in the Czech Republic - Prague and Terezin - added to her direct knowledge of what happened to those who traveled on the Kindertransports and those who stayed behind. She says the remarkable courage of those who fled Europe to pick up the pieces of their lives in a new and foreign environment, filled her with admiration of Holocaust survivors, a desire to learn from them and a need to know more about those who did not survive.