Jack Gerber’s bold acrylic paintings and dark etchings and engravings feature thick-limbed figures, their faces almost cartoonish, engaged in everyday activities, such as walking through the park, encountering a guard dog, or spending the day at the beach. Each scene is suggestive of a larger, unknown story. Arranged in couples and groups, Gerber’s characters are not isolated against stark backgrounds. Rather, their bodies overlap one another, arranged to create a continuous pattern. His work is reminiscent of Max Beckmann’s, a German Expressionist artist whose dense, figurative canvases were similarly filled with implied narrative. In Gerber’s important work Evening in the Park, a couple sits on a moonlit bench engaged in plaintive conversation, while another couple strides by unaware. The borders of one duo define the edges of the other, a pointed juxtaposition whose significance the viewer can only surmise.
Gerber was at least as important for his printmaking as for his painting. In fact, he kept a printing press in the basement of his home.
Gerber’s work was shown at, among other places, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Academy in New York, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, the Woodmere Art Museum in Chestnut Hill, and the Fellowship of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Gerber studied at the Fleisher Art Memorial as a youth. After serving in the Navy during World War II, Gerber returned to Philadelphia and used a scholarship to enroll at the School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts). Finding it inadequately challenging, he dropped out after a year and spent the next four years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
The art historian Anne R. Fabbri described Gerber’s work as “intensely colored figures in enigmatic spaces that look familiar, but it’s not the world we know.” And art critic Edward J. Sozanski wrote that his paintings “generate an exotic ambience that’s both timeless and contemporary.”
In a short autobiography, Mr. Gerber wrote that relationships between people, and between people and animals, anchor his work. “What I really like is to present a picture and then let the viewer try to figure out the subject,” he wrote. “This way, he/she can enter into the work and maybe, if it entices enough, he/she can become a part of it.”
