PITTSBURGH — In 1935, a 26-year-old largely self-taught painter named Gertrude Abercrombie accompanied her good friend, the author Thorton Wilder, to a lecture on the College of Chicago in her native Hyde Park. There, she would meet the lecturer who would turn into a lifelong affect and mentor of kinds: Gertrude Stein. An irascible American modernist who not solely revolutionized poetry however cultivated a salon of artists as an émigré in Paris, Stein instructed Abercrombie, “You gotta draw better.”
Drawing, nonetheless, was all the time secondary to portray for Abercrombie — it was her stark compositions with their idiosyncratic and private visible vocabulary made up of recurring owls and cats, doorways and moons, that made her such an interesting determine inside American surrealism. “Art has to be real crazy, real personal and real real, or it is nowhere,” Abercrombie as soon as wrote. Hers definitely was. Unjustly marginalized since her demise in 1977, which occurred on account of an habit to alcohol and after almost twenty years of manufacturing few works, Abercrombie, and her arresting oeuvre will hopefully be found by a brand new viewers within the Carnegie Museum of Artwork’s complete retrospective, The Complete World Is a Thriller.
Abercrombie wasn’t one to take Stein’s critique personally, and he or she usual herself into the “other Gertrude,” internet hosting her personal salons in her Chicago brownstone. Luminaries of the bebop jazz avant-garde counted themselves members of this confraternity, together with Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie. Feted because the “Queen of the Bohemians,” the tall, skinny, and angular Abercrombie noticed herself as a sort of jazz witch forging her dream visions into an odd, eerie, and occult physique of labor.
Gertrude Abercrombie, “Strange Shadows (Shadow and Substance)” (1950) (photograph by Michael Tropea)
As with all surrealist well worth the designation, Abercrombie and her personal psychic fractures have been her best topic. “Self-Portrait, the Striped Blouse” (1940) — completely housed on the Pennsylvania Academy of the Superb Arts in Philadelphia and painted in 1940, the final yr that she produced work for the federal Works Progress Administration — is a mirror of Abercrombie’s self-perception. Shrouded in darkness, the skinny and rectilinear artist is within the nook of a naked room, her hand resting in a bowl of grapes. Behind partially pulled-back crimson curtains is an unsettling discipline at nighttime, an alien-like inexperienced tree silhouetted by moonlight, the hazy blue sfumato imbuing the scene suggesting a nocturne earlier than daybreak. The mask-like face of Abercrombie paradoxically echoes the identical empty options of Stein in Pablo Picasso’s celebrated portrait of 1905–06, and but there’s something to be mentioned that right here, the topic has rendered herself — an act of self-creation relatively than mere statement.
A part of the uncanniness of Abercrombie’s works paradoxically arises from the mutedness of her surrealism: Regardless of the occasional lions enjoying a recreation of chess, there aren’t any melting clocks or locomotives rising from fireplaces. The disquieting dream logic of an Abercrombie composition as an alternative appears designed to unnerve greater than to shock, a quintessentially American creativeness that’s much less Salvador Dali than it’s David Lynch. For that matter, regardless of her personal claims of getting been influenced by Stein, the literary modernist Abercrombie most resembles is one other Pennsylvanian poet: the airtight, occult prophetess H.D. Like H.D., Abercrombie is an artist whose storehouse of photographs is private and eccentric, for each are creators of a mythopoesis in some methods inscrutable and impenetrable — however all of the extra alluring due to it. “At least I have the flowers of myself,/and my thoughts, no god/can take that,” H.D. wrote in her 1917 poem “Eurydice.” These phrases apply equally to the painter.
Born to touring opera-performer dad and mom in Austin, Abercrombie was raised for just a few years in small-town Illinois earlier than transferring to South Chicago, residing in Hyde Park earlier than the College of Chicago would decimate the multi-racial working-class neighborhood within the title of city renewal and gentrification. Dedicated to rules of interracial solidarity and gender equality, Abercrombie’s love of jazz (Gillespie famously known as her a “bop artist”) in addition to her adamant refusal to evolve to home expectations in her two marriages earned her the aforementioned royal sobriquet. Consistent with the custom of European surrealists like Max Ernst, her work was all the time political, albeit filtered by a distinctly American sensibility. Because the exhibition information notes, “Design for Death” (1946) was supposedly Charlie Parker’s favourite composition. In it, a ladder is propped towards the trunk of a gnarled, blackened, and barren tree marked by moonlight on an in any other case ink-blue night. A hangman’s noose is tied throughout a department. Doubtlessly impressed by Billie Holliday’s haunting rendition of the traditional “Strange Fruit,” the reference to lynching within the portray is clear, whereas the distortions and the unusual lighting — mainstays of Abercrombie — render their topic appropriately nightmarish.
Gertrude Abercrombie, “Charlie Parker’s Favorite Painting” (1946), oil on Masonite
Abercrombie’s influences are clear, however like every nice artist, she forges this disparate tangle into one thing distinctive. Her shadows, strains, and contorted views evoke Giorgio de Chirico, whereas her colours and clean surfaces, in addition to her placement of standard objects in incongruous settings, recall René Magritte, whom she particularly talked about in interviews. “Strange Shadows (Shadow and Substance)” (1950) exemplifies her fashion. A tall and skinny lady in a turquoise costume, presumably the artist’s double (she seems in lots of compositions), holds her hand aloft, however the shadow she casts is of a tree with an owl on a department. Throughout from her, a clean, white column with a blue glass positioned atop it casts a shadow within the silhouette of a girl holding a glass. Stark and unusual, the portray conjures her influences however is unmistakably Abercrombie’s, the autobiographical determine so frequent in her work infusing the portray with the witchy, occult, airtight sensibility that she cultivated.
Surprisingly, the artist Abercrombie jogged my memory of most wasn’t Joan Miró or Man Ray — not even Leonora Carrington — however relatively a surrealist of a unique kind within the youngsters’s ebook illustrator Clement Hurd, celebrated for his footage in Margaret Clever Brown’s traditional Goodnight Moon (1947). Each have a passion for misleading simplicity and clear strains; each are conversant with the charged mysticism of highly effective archetypes and of lonely fields on a moonlit night time. Such a comparability isn’t to Abercrombie’s detriment, however relatively to Hurd’s elevation. Extra importantly, it speaks to a sure shared Americanness between them — whereas Abercrombie by no means denied her similarity to the Surrealists, her personal program was essentially hers alone, a rugged individualist on a psychic errand into the wilderness. What Abercrombie’s work exemplified was her personal precept of the “point of contact,” the place the place subjectivities collide, even when they aren’t mutually understandable. Some extent of contact makes an area for communication — not regardless of, however due to the mysteries of personhood. The Carnegie’s enigmatic exhibition, threaded by with Abercombie’s repeating motifs of night time and the moon, ladders and doorways, exemplifies such communication. It’s an expertise that feels as a lot as having your Tarot learn because it does a visit to the museum.
Gertrude Abercrombie, “A Game of Kings” (1947) (photograph by Michael Tropea)
Gertrude Abercrombie: The Complete World Is a Thriller continues on the Carnegie Museum of Artwork (4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) by June 1. The exhibition was curated by Eric Crosby and Cynthia Stucki. It’ll journey to Colby Faculty Museum of Artwork from July 12, 2025 by January 11, 2026.
