This portrait of Gertrude Genis, a German communist, intelligence agent and Jurgis Preiss’s first wife, belongs to the short and dramatic Tomsk period in the artist’s creative career. Their marriage lasted seventeen years. They got married in 1927. This woman was everything for him: love, life partner, and party comrade. Because of their relationship, Preiss became interested in politics. At twenty-two, he joined the Communist Party and soon started spying for the USSR and living a double life, like Gertrude.
During these years, the couple kept changing their place of residence: they moved from Europe to Moscow, then to Siberia. Their forced exile turned into a life-long penal settlement. Preiss and his wife accepted the citizenship of the USSR before the World War II began, and then in 1941, they were sent to a camp in Siberia, together with other Germans. Soon, Gertrude died of tuberculosis when they were in Tomsk. It was there that Preiss created his first tragic art works. Among them, Genya Wearing a Warm Jacket. The portrait shows a tired and aged woman. Wrapping herself in a cardigan, the frail woman is trying in vain to keep warm. She looks helplessly at her husband, probably realizing that she is beyond recovery. This portrait continues the intimist current in Preiss’s creative work. It reflects special moments of life, that was, however, most often joyless in the conditions of Soviet reality.
