Along with her husband Melvin Jacobs, she built relationships with key artists from the Dada and Surrealist movements during the 1950s and 1960s and assembled a rare and notable collection of their works.
[3] She had a distinguished twenty-four year career as a pioneering retail buyer for Macy's, during which she built lasting relationships with artists whose work would form the core of a celebrated art collection.
From the 1970s to the early 1990s, photographs of the power couple frequently appeared on the pages of Women's Wear Daily and in the local press in New York City, Miami, Cincinnati, and elsewhere where they attended fashion, art, and philanthropic events.
"[10] Shortly before embarking on her first overseas buying trip for Macy's, in 1954, she met American artists and art patrons Noma and William Copley who were visiting New York from their French home.
[14] On a subsequent trip to Paris in 1955, Gersten Jacobs met and befriended the American photographer Lee Miller and British Surrealist Roland Penrose.
[19] One of twenty paintings in the Shakespearean Equations series the artist produced while living in Hollywood, the work had been among those featured in the Man Ray exhibition at Copley’s gallery in 1948.
[21] Immediately after encountering the work at the artist’s exhibition at the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris in 1962 and recognizing its witty layering of meaning, Gersten Jacobs set out to acquire it.
Embraced as members of an extended family centered around Man Ray and Juliet and the Copleys, the Jacobses would also build lasting friendships with artists Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, and dealers Julien Levy, Alexander Iolas, acquiring works directly from them.
Other artists from the Dada and Surrealist movements represented in their collection include Hans Bellmer, Salvador Dalí, Roberto Matta, Francis Picabia, Joseph Cornell, Mina Loy, Leon Kelly, Yves Tanguy, Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schultze), and Paul Delvaux.
Her jewelry collection grew to include brooches, bracelets, rings, earrings and other accessories not only by Man Ray but also Pablo Picasso, Matta, Ernst, Claude Lalanne, Roy Lichtenstein, Niki de Saint Phalle, and, especially, Noma Copley.
Gersten Jacobs reflected on their experience in an interview in 1999, noting that “[w]e moved in a visually exciting world of fashion and design and developed an affinity for art that challenged the boundaries of reality.
After the family moved to Miami in 1972, Gersten Jacobs served on the Board of Governors during the formative period in the development of what subsequently became the Perez Art Museum.