Gertrude Abercrombie Show Proves “The Whole World Is a Mystery”

A few months before she died in July 1977, the Chicago painter Gertrude Abercrombie—by then largely housebound and plagued by the arthritis that had forced her to stop painting years earlier—gave an interview to local broadcaster Studs Terkel. “Everything is autobiographical in a sense but kind of dreamy. It’s way off in the skies,” the artist said, alluding to her methods as an engineer of uncanny nocturnes.

It’s true that Abercrombie didn’t camouflage the personal traces in her work. The bleached ruins of a slaughterhouse in Aledo, Illinois, her childhood hometown, are the subject of a painting from 1937. The eerie suitors and tense courtships throughout her art are allegories for her own jinxed marriages. And then there are the cats—dozens of them, prowling or stoic doppelgangers of the real-life felines who roamed Abercrombie’s Hyde Park Victorian.   

Still, autobiography can’t account for the pervasive unreality of Abercrombie’s work in “The Whole World Is a Mystery,” a mesmerizing if prudishly designed retrospective at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh that gathers more than 80 Abercrombie paintings in the largest exhibition for the artist to date. Nor can it account for the vignettes that unfold as if by some narcotized logic. Her motifs—flags, dominoes, seashells, snails, moons, eggs, owls—only heighten the otherworldliness. In painting after painting, figures (mostly women, mostly solitary) seem bewitched as they trek across stark Midwestern landscapes, tarrying on some inscrutable errand. When Abercrombie does offer up interiors, they’re sparsely furnished and dingy, like rooms in a flophouse. Letters are sometimes depicted slipped under doors, bearing who knows what ominous or tragic summons. Paintings-within-paintings hang on her walls in a trippy hall-of-mirrors.

“The Whole World Is a Mystery” (on view at the Carnegie through June 1, before it travels to the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine and then the Milwaukee Art Museum) expands on an acclaimed 2018 exhibition at Karma in New York—and, like that show, is accompanied by a sumptuous bells-and-whistle catalog. The new retrospective is divided into seven chapters that showcase different thematic or formal aspects of Abercrombie’s career, including the miniatures and still lifes that are often overlooked. This show should finally set the record straight: here is an American visionary whose obsessive paintings are at once stylized and crudely instinctive, achieving a kind of cryptic simplicity that might be called folk surrealism. 

Wall text at the Carnegie notes that Abercrombie “has been historically marginalized due to who she was and how she lived and worked.” How she lived was as the self-declared “Queen of Bohemia” whose home was a crash pad for touring jazz musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday, and whose coterie included queer men like novelist James Purdy and artist Karl Priebe. Such mixed company was unusual in midcentury America—as was Abercrombie’s aversion to homemaking and mothering. Later, her alcoholism contributed to the physical and mental deterioration that made her largely reclusive. Although she had exhibitions in Chicago and New York during her lifetime, she has remained a cult figure until the past few years, after the Karma show introduced her to new audiences. While it’s hard to say how much her eccentric lifestyle impeded her legacy, the fact that she was a woman—from the Midwest, no less—did her few favors.

Critics have described Abercrombie, never satisfactorily, as a surrealist or a magic realist. Her surrealism isn’t the capital-S import from Europe. Despite hints of Giorgio de Chirico in some of her architectural accents or Yves Tanguy in her sedimented skies, or—most especially—her visual rapport with René Magritte (whom she called her “spiritual daddy”), Abercrombie’s work is terser, with an explicitly feminine viewpoint and an almost pragmatic sensibility. There are no melting clocks in her paintings, no biomorphic creatures. She rarely even violates the laws of psychics. When her paintings are forthrightly fabulist—as in A Game of Kings (1947), which features two lions playing chess—they come off as a little hokey. 

Abercrombie’s finest paintings aren’t surreal at all, at least not in the typical sense. They’re just atmospheric to the point of unnaturalness, with quirks that recall regionalism or WPA-era art. (Abercrombie herself was an artist for the Works Progress Administration.) In Self-Portrait, the Striped Blouse (1940), one of her many hypnotic self-portraits, what draws the eye as much as the sitter’s prison-striped shirt is the deranged tree and bruised cloud outside the window. Here, internal and exterior states converge. Charlie Parker’s Favorite Painting (1946) indicates Abercrombie’s engagement with social issues: a yellow noose, nearly fluorescent against a dishwater sky, dangles from a barren tree—an oblique lament from the doggedly antiracist Abercrombie. In other works, such as Winding Road (1937) and Figure in a Landscape (1939), women trudge through empty countryside, stalked by freak clouds or stunted trees. (Those weird trees were once common among a certain cadre of now forgotten painters like Buell Whitehead and Karl Fortress.)

Such mis-en-scènes mark Abercrombie as a landscape painter, although of the psychogeographic variety in which a horizon is as sinister as a knife. Take for example White House (1945), in which the namesake dwelling sits at the end of a long lane leading toward portentous hills. The scene gets more unsettling the farther it recedes. Elsewhere, Abercrombie’s pastorals are almost like burlesques of plein air painting. In Out in the Country (1939), a woman lounges in a farmyard, seemingly relaxed, but a brood of trees and distant humped hills like burial mounds spoil the bucolic mood. Similarly, The Church (1938) looks benign enough: a well-coiffed woman, seen from behind, ambles toward a little country chapel way down a dirt road. But look closer and you realize that all of the trees are dead and leafless, some blackened as if by blight or fire. A few clouds overhead are smudged black too, and the whole style of the painting has a vulgarity verging on cartoonish.

At the Carnegie, gauzy floor-to-ceiling curtains demarcate the show, evoking the permeable thresholds in Abercrombie’s work. In Letter from Karl (1940), The Past and the Present (c. 1945), and Cats, Screen, and Ghost (1950), for example, small paintings-within-paintings capture nature scenes, blurring the boundaries between what’s indoors and out. And doors just as often serve as walls, as in the series Abercrombie began in 1955, inspired by the salvaged doors from demolition jobs in her Chicago neighborhood. Wall text tells us that these jobs were part of the city’s vast urban renewal program that displaced Black residents; the doors were repurposed as walls around construction sites. The colors in this series—seafoam, cherry, ultramarine—are almost explosive in contrast to the earthy palettes elsewhere.

The door series emphasizes one weakness of the show: its unadventurous hang. Paintings beetle around the room, one by one, hung at standard height—a horizontal plumbline perhaps meant to mimic the flatland of Abercrombie’s art but which overstates certain repetitions. There are few double hangs, and no salon-style walls. The door series, in particular, comes off as belabored because of its rote presentation. Here, variation becomes wallpaper. The layout is a missed opportunity, as one of the pleasures of Abercrombie is to witness the interplay between her narratives and tropes rather than consider them in isolation.

Yet, an artist like Abercrombie comes along rarely, and a show like this more rarely still. Her exquisite miniatures and still lifes alone are worth the journey. Taken together, these paintings are an offshoot of modernism that was perhaps only possible in a place like Chicago—an inland jewel that was neither coast nor prairie, frontier nor empire, but something stranger, lonelier.