Annot

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German painter, art teacher, art writer and pacifist, also known after her marriage as Annot Jacobi. From 1928 to 1930 she concentrated on a painting cycle in which she portrayed the faces of working women. This cycle of paintings includes a woman surgeon, a lawyer and a physiotherapist. As a result of political hostility in Germany, she later spent much of her life in the United States and Puerto Rico. Annot came from an upper-class family of academics. Her father was a professor of theoretical physics at the University in Berlin and her mother a professional singer. Her godparents included the composer Johannes Brahms and the painter Adolph Menzel, who was also her great uncle. Annot was part of the Berlin Succession, an avant-garde artists group that reportedly admitted only one or two women. She signed her works "Annot". In 1916, in protest against World War I she distributed self-written pacifist memoranda, and was sentenced to jail for 30 days. During 1916 to 1920, Annot lived in Oslo, Norway, where she continued to advocate for peace. In 1920 she returned to Berlin. She was a friend of Annette Kolb and Carl von Ossietzky. In 1921 she married the painter Rudolf Jacobi. They had two children, and lived from 1923 to 1926 in Positano. From 1926 to 1928 Annot went to Paris to study with the painter André Lhote. In 1928, she and her husband opened a painting school, Malschule Annot, in Berlin. They also had a joint exhibition at Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf. Several of Annot's paintings were purchased for the National Gallery in Berlin. In 1933 the Jacobis were forced to close their school on the orders of the Nazis, because they refused to dismiss their Jewish pupils. Her paintings were designated in Nazi Germany as "degenerate" and destroyed or stolen. Annot then emigrated with her husband to the United States, opening the Annot Art School and Gallery at Rockefeller Center. During the 1930s and 1940s they lived in New York. Annot won numerous awards, including a gold medal for her picture of Käthe Kruse and her children, in an exhibition in New York City in 1935. Annot also supported herself and her family by working as an interior designer. Rudolf Jacobi, Annot's spouse, died in 1972. Annot died on 20 October 1981, aged 86, in Munich, Germany. Link to Wikipedia biography