“Surrealism is meant for me because I am a pretty realistic person but don’t like all I see,” Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977) as soon as mentioned. “So I dream that it is changed. Then I change it to the way I want it.”
Abercrombie’s stark, symbol-rich landscapes and enigmatic portraits painted in oil had been influenced by the European Surrealist motion, magical realism, and her personal desires. A number one determine in Chicago artwork, she was additionally concerned within the metropolis’s jazz scene, counting musical greats like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughan amongst her mates.
The artist’s mystical works “suggest a life of wistful introspection and emotional struggle,” says an announcement for the forthcoming exhibition Gertrude Abercrombie: The Entire World Is a Thriller on the Carnegie Museum of Artwork. The present and accompanying catalog current a possibility for guests to expertise the artist’s extremely private work in important depth, with entry to artworks held in a variety of personal and public collections all gathered in a single place.
Born in Austin, Texas, Abercrombie grew up within the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago and spent a while in her father’s hometown of Aledo, Illinois. The small city within the northwestern a part of the Midwestern state ultimately turned a supply of inspiration for her atmospheric work.
The artist studied the Romance languages on the College of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign after which pursued a course in industrial artwork on the American Academy of Artwork in Chicago, the place she can also have briefly attended the Faculty of the Artwork Institute.
In 1932, Abercrombie started her profession as knowledgeable artist, which was spurred quickly after by the help of the Federal Artwork Challenge of the Works Progress Administration (FPA/WPA). This system ran from 1935 to 1943 and offered financial aid to artists and craftspeople throughout the Nice Melancholy. Together with Abercrombie, a slew of notable artists participated, from Arshile Gorky and Lucile Blanch to Jackson Pollock and Diego Rivera, amongst many others.
The Federal Artwork Challenge arrange group facilities across the U.S., sustaining the careers and livelihoods of round 10,000 artisans who contributed an estimated 400,000 easel work, prints, murals, posters, and different works throughout this system’s eight-year run.
Abercrombie participated within the FAP/WPA from 1935 to 1940. Round this time, she confirmed her work broadly, together with in annual exhibitions introduced by the Artwork Institute of Chicago and venues like Katharine Kuh Gallery, one of many metropolis’s first industrial galleries to function avant-garde work.
Motifs like solitary girls, lifeless bushes, forking paths, stark landscapes, doorways, cats, towers, and shells recur in her work. Abercrombie remarked that the scenes had been at all times “pretty real,” merging sides of actuality and the improbable. “Only mystery and fantasy have been added,” she mentioned. “All foolishness has been taken out. It becomes my own dream.”
In “Demolition Doors” (1964), for instance, a black feline parks in entrance of a sequence of three multi-colored panels occupying a lot of the body, behind which sits a grey, largely empty panorama that may very well be both indoors or outside. Portal-like, the doorways signify selections one makes about what route to take, what threshold to cross. The cat stands sentry, ready on the viewer’s—and by extension, the artist’s—final choice. “The whole world is a mystery,” she had mentioned.
Abercrombie related a few of her recurring symbols with a witch’s persona—traditionally an identification linked predominantly to girls—which she generally embraced in her personal trend selections. She often donned a pointed velvet hat to intensify her sharp options and tall stature. The feminine determine, together with Abercrombie’s personal likeness, is usually proven traversing barren terrain, reclining in pensive quietude, or interacting with otherworldly forces.
In an interview with Studs Terkel shortly earlier than her loss of life, Abercrombie mentioned that “it is always myself that I paint.” For instance, in “Split Personality” (1954), a girl in a blue costume, standing inside an unadorned room, has been reduce in half on the waist. Her torso and head hover over a pitcher, and she or he reaches out towards her legs, however the shadow on the wall to the left depicts an entire determine—the sum of two components—as a approach of suggesting that appears might be deceiving.
“With a deft hand, a concise symbolic vocabulary, and a restrained palette, she created potent images that speak to her mercurial nature and her evolving psychology as an artist,” says an exhibition assertion.
Later in life, Abercrombie’s creative output steadily waned as ongoing well being points associated to arthritis and alcoholism took a toll. She turned extra reclusive as she ultimately required a wheelchair, earlier than being confined to mattress. A serious retrospective of her work was held on the Hyde Park Artwork Middle the yr she died, and her will established the Gertrude Abercrombie Belief, which distributed her work and items by others in her assortment to cultural establishments throughout the Midwest.
Gertrude Abercrombie: The Entire World Is a Thriller opens in Pittsburgh on January 18 and continues by way of June 1. The exhibition then travels to Colby School Museum of Artwork in Waterville, Maine, opening on July 12 and working by way of January 11, 2026. Discover extra on the Carnegie web site.
