Gertrude Abercrombie

Abercrombie explored a personal iconography that pictured a more-than-human world—one that was as marvelous as it was disquieting. Her strange trees commingled with a menagerie of objects and entities, including owls, cats, seashells, dice, towers, freestanding walls and doors, magicians, men who bore a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, ladders, eggs, moons, and tall, lithe, dark-haired women, the last of which were self-portraits.

The first nationally traveling retrospective of Abercrombie’s art to date, “The Whole World Is a Mystery,”curated by Eric Crosby and Sarah Humphreville (of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art and the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, respectively), charts her career in Chicago from the 1930s to the early ’70s. Abercrombie was born in 1909 in Austin. Her parents were traveling opera singers, and she experienced an itinerant early childhood, a lifestyle eventually curtailed by World War I. In 1915, the artist’s family moved to her father’s hometown—Aledo, Illinois—which Gertrude would come to identify with and visit as an adult, even though the Abercrombies relocated to the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago just one year later. Motifs from the artist’s photographs of Aledo appear in her paintings, such as an abandoned concrete slaughterhouse and, notably, a severely pruned tree. But the artist remained in Chicago, where she became a denizen of the city’s vibrant jazz scene and a beloved host to raucous salons for local creatives.  

The details of Abercrombie’s artistic education are hazy: She often described herself as self-taught, but likewise claimed to have attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Robert Cozzolino, a curator and Abercrombie scholar, concluded that she never enrolled at SAIC, and thus may have informally audited classes. Whatever the case, it’s clear that she began painting in 1932 and participated in a group show the same year, which the chronology in the exhibition catalogue notes was likely precipitated by connections she made with other artists by doing commercial illustration work. Abercrombie established herself sufficiently by 1935 to secure employment through the Works Progress Administration as part of the New Deal initiative to support artists during America’s Great Depression. That same year, Abercrombie attended a lecture by Gertrude Stein at the University of Chicago; the novelist’s discussion of repetition as a rhetorical strategy and the conflation between inside and outside became paramount to the artist’s work. It was during this period of intellectual development that Abercrombie established many of the symbols that would populate her visual lexicon. In Tree, Table, and Cat, 1937, for example, a lone woman in a wide-brimmed hat and an ankle-length dress stands with her back against a large, forked tree trunk. The figure grips the wooden base while gazing out of the picture plane. Before her is a table set with a stark white cloth and a bowl of bread, as though prepared for some unknown ritual. This odd scene takes place under the night sky; the moon glows amid expressively rendered clouds. The setting is sparse and contains no specific markers of place. All the elements of this painting—tree, table, cat, etc.—would appear in myriad permutations across Abercrombie’s work over the ensuing decades. Numerous compositions allude to rites enacted by dark-haired figures with familiars (nocturnal creatures such as owls and cats abound, but giraffes, horses, and even a whale show up), illustrating kinships between women and animals that were evident in the work of other artists during this period—particularly those on the margins of Surrealism, including Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. Abercrombie also reveled in the pyrotechnics of enchantment: In some pictures, her surrogate levitates or appears sawed in half. Various masked characters lend a campy performativity to certain scenes, as well as a goofy eroticism (indeed, she has noted the influence of her own complicated romantic entanglements on her work). 

Abercrombie’s milieu was distinctly queer, in the sense that gender and sexuality were accepted as open and fluid among its participants, including the artists Karl Priebe (her closest friend), Marshall Glasier, Dudley Huppler, John Wilde, Carl Van Vechten, and Samantha H. Woolf. While she married twice and had one daughter, accounts of Abercrombie’s life emphasize her rejection of social conventions and gender norms, citing a lack of interest in motherhood and an active sexual life outside of her marriages. 

Her creative circle was also racially diverse: In her large Victorian home on Dorchester Avenue in Chicago’s Hyde Park, the artist hosted jam sessions and social gatherings with jazz luminaries such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Sonny Rollins. Abercrombie even referred to her practice as “bop art,” a term she created because there was already “a thing called Op art and . . . a thing called Pop art.” Gillespie saw that her work was in direct dialogue with jazz, purportedly remarking that she “[took] the essence of our music and transported it into another art form.” Granted, Abercrombie’s worlds are suffused with an uncanny stillness, a mood that strikes a far cry from the auditory dynamism of jazz. Yet the connection holds in relation to the complexity and structural specificity of bebop, which, as art historian Donna M. Cassidy aptly notes in her essay for the catalogue, was “suitable for listening, not dancing.” Working with dissonant harmonies and chord progressions like the flatted fifth (often avoided by composers, and the title for one of Abercrombie’s personal notebooks), bebop musicians subverted familiar chord sequences to render them off kilter. She likewise composed from a fixed iconography, but combined and recombined her symbols into unsettling, even jarring juxtapositions that resist straightforward narrative interpretation.  

While the paintings contain few allusions to a specific place or time, Abercrombie occasionally engaged with politics and current events. In one notable example, Charlie Parker’s Favorite Painting, 1946, a characteristically barren tree bears a noose. There are no humans or animals here—the sorceress and her familiars have no dominion over this depth of evil. The branches jut out sharply, evoking pitchforks or other instruments of force. An exhibition text speculates that this anti-lynching painting—originally titled Design for Death—reflects the influence of the Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit” (1939)and perhaps responded to the racist violence directed at Black soldiers returning from World War II. 

In the subsequent decade, Abercrombie embarked on “Demolition Doors,” a series of paintings that more obliquely responded to external events and incursions of power on the artist’s community. By 1955, when she began the series, Hyde Park was undergoing an urban renewal plan at the behest of the University of Chicago. Targeted demolitions effectively gentrified the area, driving out many low-income Black residents. During this period, the artist encountered the remains of eradicated homes in the form of doors removed from buildings, repurposed as makeshift walls around construction sites. The paintings picture them standing rigidly on streets and sidewalks, like sentinels. Unmoored from their architectural settings, the doors are mute and impassive monuments to the family dwellings they once adorned. 

From the late ’30s to the end of the ’50s, when her health began to decline, Abercrombie exhibited widely in Chicago with sporadic shows in New York. There was a frequency of solo presentations so intense during the early ’50s that she started working with miniature formats to keep up with demand, including paintings meant to be worn as brooches. In spite of being supported in her own time, Abercrombie has remained a relatively obscure figure following her death (although she was prominently featured in the 2006 exhibition “With Friends: Six Magic Realists, 1940–1965,” curated by Cozzolino at the Chazen Museum in Madison, Wisconsin). 

In addition to introducing audiences to a figure under-represented in narratives of postwar American art, “The Whole World Is a Mystery”can be understood as part of a recent swell of interest in women associated with Surrealism—however tenuous the links between someone like Abercrombie and the movement may have been. In her own time, Abercrombie’s work was lumped in with Surrealism, Superrealism, and Magic Realism. She seems to have been reluctant to name influences, although she eventually acknowledged the pervasive impact of René Magritte on her work, describing him as her “spiritual daddy.” 

Recent engagement with Abercrombie’s output also dovetails with broader reassessments of modernism in the United States, which foreground more oblique historical narratives. The exhibition “Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art,” organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2021 (also curated by Cozzolino), argued that an exploration of enigmatic phenomena—ghosts, the occult, extraterrestrial contact—are central, though repressed, elements of American modernism. Similarly, with the 2021 show “Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery, and Imagination in American Realism” at the Georgia Museum of Art, curator Jeffrey Richmond-Moll explored the (still under-studied) tendency of Magic Realism in postwar American art, an aesthetic coding and visual doublespeak that often gestured toward subjects considered dangerously taboo during the witch-hunting McCarthy era, such as queer identity and desire (Abercrombie’s work was included in both the “Supernatural America” and “Extra Ordinary” shows). 

Abstraction has also been undergoing reassessment with the explosion of interest in the work of Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint. This fascination with the occult is not new, but part of a longer historical ebb and flow of visibility and attention, especially at fraught times (Spiritualism, for example, experienced a resurgence during the American Civil War, as people had a desire to commune with loved ones who perished in staggering numbers during this hideous battle). In a 1977 issue of the journal Chrysalis, Lucy Lippard observed that a significant number of contemporary artists who identified as feminists invoked rituals to conjure a past when magic—which she defines as communication with animals and supernatural forces—was still the domain of women.