Jane Heap told her pupils that when she “met the teaching in the person of G. I. Gurdjieff she turned her back on her old life, locked her studio on Long Island and painted no more.” From that time in 1924 until her death in 1964, she sought to understand and apply to her own life the Gurdjieff teaching, while fulfilling important functions in transmitting the ideas to others. After several years of work and preparation, Gurdjieff sent her to assist A. R. Orage in establishing work groups in London, and in editing Beelzebub’s Tales.
Jane Heap left no lectures, no books, only the notes she wrote down for talks to her groups on the ideas of Gurdjieff. Her legacy was an oral, living one, passed through her pupils, who report that her teaching touched their feelings as well as thought. She had an exceptionally brilliant mind and a remarkable gift for exact formulation. As A. L. Staveley, her pupil for some 20 years, put it, “she was an artist in words as well as materials of all kinds. The precision with which an idea was presented, the fact that it appeared as a picture rather than as verbal thought, was a little shock and entered a pupil as an unforgettable impression.” Peter Brook, also a pupil of Jane’s, has described Jane Heap as “gentle, ferocious, and compassionate.”
