1893 Eugen Gabritschevsky was born on December 3 in Moscow. He was the second son of a family of five siblings, Alexander (1891-1968), Georg (1896-1979), Elen (1899-1937) and Irene (1900-1996), and had no descendants bearing
Gabritschevsky's name. His father Georg N. Gabritschevsky (1860-1907), an internationally recognized bacteriologist, worked with Louis Pasteur in Paris and Robert Koch in Germany. As a university professor he founded the first Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow.
1907 Premature death of his father when Eugen was 14 years old. His mother Elen (1862-1930) takes care of the children's education. The family now lives with Vladimir and Elena Stankevitch, Eugen's mother's aunt and uncle. Eugen grew up in a privileged, cultured and multilingual social environment, which will be reflected in his work. Nearly twenty private teachers, academics and artists, ensured the education of the Gabritschevsky children, who all spoke several languages. From an early age, Eugen made drawings and paintings on paper. "There is not a single period in his life, during which he did not draw or paint in his free time. Eugen was already drawing when he could hardly read and write", his brother Georg says in 1959.
1907 Trip to France. Around 1910 Eugen Gabritschevsky visits an exhibition of members of Mir iskousstva (The World of Art). Initiated by Diaghilev. This group influenced the evolution of theatrical decor and played a decisive role in the birth of the Ballets Russes. His frequent visits to this group may have had an impact on the young Eugen and explain the important place of staging in his work. During his youth in Moscow, Eugen Gabritschevsky frequented the literary salon of Margarita Morozov (1873-1958), wife of Mikhail Morozov and sister-in-law of Ivan Morozov, both collectors. Through them he may have discovered a large number of works by Western artists of the time.
1910-1911 He visited the exhibition of the Moscow movement The Jack of Diamonds (1910-1913), which brought together works by the Bourliouk brothers, Goncharova, Larionov, Malevich, Survage, Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Münster. The movement reinterprets the achievements of Cézanne and post-impressionism, those of Fauvism and the expressionism of the Blaue Reiter.
1912 He attended the conference-debates organized by Le Valet de carreau at the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow.
1913 At the age of 20, he enters the Moscow University in biology, where he is mainly interested in questions related to heredity, pursuing
training in embryology, histology, microscopic technique, and anatomy of vertebrates and invertebrates. His early interest in nature, particularly entomology, seems to have guided his academic studies and explains the omnipresence of an animal world, hybrid and imaginary, in his works. As Georg writes, "his fantasy went hand in hand with his scientific and logical thinking".
1914 Second trip to Western Europe with his family. He went to France, England and returned to Russia via Norway and Sweden.
1917 He went through the war years and the October Revolution without any problems. He was exempted from mobilization as a student.
1924-1927 He left the Soviet Union in 1924, never to return. He stayed briefly in Munich before arriving in New York on January 19, 1925, to pursue postdoctoral studies at Columbia University under the direction of Professor Thomas Hunt Morgan. From the summer of 1925 to the beginning of 1926, he worked at the Woods Hole laboratory in Massachusetts. During this American period, he met a young French woman called Tiette, with whom he had a romantic relationship.
1927-1929 In 1927, Eugen Gabritschevsky joined the Pasteur Institute in Paris, to work under the direction of Professor Roux. The articles he published were on "the compensation of the separate growth of the limbs of spiders" and on the behavior and evolution of flies. In 1929, he worked for a few months at the Academy of Sciences in Munich and published his research in German. Georg mentions that his brother's health worsens during these years, forcing him to stop his work repeatedly.
1930 His mother dies in Munich after seeing her sons, Eugen and Georg.
1931 In April, Eugen arrived at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, as a guest of the geneticist Francis Albert Eley Crew. In October, he was forced to interrupt his research due to his deteriorating health and returned to Munich. He was finally committed to the psychiatric hospital in Eglfing-Haar, where he remained until his death in 1979, except for intermittent stays with friends and his brother. In Haar, he devoted himself intensely to creation. He worked with recycled materials (calendar, X-ray paper, hospital administrative documents). His brother reports that Eugen also writes a lot (letters and philosophical essays).
1939-1945 During the Second World War, Eugen would have been hosted by several people, in particular by Mrs. Kleindinst, a former German housekeeper of his mother who had returned home.
1945 His scientific works, stored in Georg's apartment in Munich, are destroyed in the bombings.
1948 Jean Dubuffet is informed of the existence of the work by Professor Von Braunmuhl, the artist's doctor.
1950 Georg Gabritschevsky emigrates to Washington; he instructs a close friend, Emma Poncelet, to visit Eugen regularly in the hospital.
1960 Georg, who wished to keep his brother's work alive, agreed that Jean Dubuffet would inform his friend Alphonse Chave, a gallery owner in Vence, who went to Germany accompanied by his son Pierre and the collector Jacques Uhlmann to acquire more than 5,000 sheets, of which 3,000 were considered important by Chave. That same year, Alphonse sold 642 works to the Daniel Cordier gallery, whose future donations in 1989 to the Musée National d'Art Moderne - Centre Georges Pompidou, will make the work better known in France. In 1972, Max Ernst bought five paintings, which he installed in his living room. Today, the Chave gallery continues to defend the work.
1962-1963 In a letter to his brother Alexander, whom he has not seen since his departure from Russia, Eugen writes: "I live in a prison called here Anstalt [...] I have painted mostly fantastic paintings. There were exhibitions in Frankfurt, New York, Vence (in France), and they described me as a painter of genius. Now I don't work much and I live with the criticism of the past. I worked like a madman for a while but now it's all in the past."
1979 Eugen Gabritchevsky died on April 5 at the age of 86 in Haar.