Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery
Edited with text by Eric Crosby, Sarah Humphreville. Foreword by Eric Crosby, Jacqueline Terrassa. Text by Katie Anania, Donna Cassidy, John Corbett. Chronology by Cynthia Stucki.
A sumptuously produced retrospective on the beloved and under-published Chicago-based Surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie, the "queen of the bohemian artists"
Published with Carnegie Museum of Art and Colby College Museum of Art.
This book is the definitive scholarly volume on Chicago artist Gertrude Abercrombie, who was a critical figure in the midcentury Chicago art and jazz scenes. Abercrombie was a creative force of singular vision who, from the 1930s until her death in 1977, produced enigmatic paintings full of personal significance. With a deft hand, a concise symbolic vocabulary and a restrained palette, she produced potent images that speak to her mercurial nature and her evolving psychology as an artist. Cats, owls, doors, moons, barren trees, seashells and searching female figures all converge in her mysterious works, which suggest a life of purposeful introspection and emotional struggle. Drawing consistently on her dreams as source material, Abercrombie said, "The whole world is a mystery." Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery accompanies the artist’s first retrospective since 1991: an eponymous exhibition which begins at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh before traveling to the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine and the Milwaukee Art Museum. Gertrude Abercrombie was born in 1909 in Austin, Texas, and spent most of her life in Chicago, focusing on her art full time beginning in the early 1930s. Her work was in part inspired by jazz, and she was the host of legendary parties and jam sessions frequented by icons such as Dizzy Gillespie, who was a close friend. She died in Chicago in 1977, at age 68.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Air Mail
Elena Clavarino
This exhibition offers a comprehensive survey of [Gertrude Abercrombie's] simple weirdness.
Artnet
Katie White
While many museums and galleries have, over the past decade, focused on the rediscoveries of women artists who were forgotten over the decades or overlooked in their own times, the story of Gertrude Abercrombie has particularly captivated art lovers and the momentum around her continues to grow.
Hyperallergic
Ed SImon
The disquieting dream logic of an Abercrombie composition [...] seems designed to unnerve more than to shock, a quintessentially American imagination that’s less Salvador Dali than it is David Lynch.
The Wall Street Journal
Peter Plagens
[A] quietly and weirdly charming artist.
Art in America
Larry Lybarger
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.
Artforum
Paula Burleigh
Abercrombie explored a personal iconography that pictured a more-than-human world—one that was as marvelous as it was disquieting.
Hyperallergic
Albert Mobilio
This is a must-have book for anyone interested in a way of painting that is mysterious, enchanting, and revelatory, as well as the life of an artist who reminds us that the work is a calling, not just a profession.
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“There is magic everywhere if you stop and look and listen. … Everything is strange. I think it’s a scream we’re here at all … don’t you?” So the under-published midcentury Chicago Surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie is quoted in the innovatively designed exhibition catalog, The Whole World is a Mystery, published to accompany the Abercrombie retrospective opening July 12 at Colby College Museum of Art, en route to Milwaulkee Art Museum and Norton Museum of Art through April 2027. Featured image is Demolition Doors (1964). continue to blog
Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery
Published by DelMonico Books. Edited with text by Eric Crosby, Sarah Humphreville. Foreword by Eric Crosby, Jacqueline Terrassa. Text by Katie Anania, Donna Cassidy, John Corbett. Chronology by Cynthia Stucki.
A sumptuously produced retrospective on the beloved and under-published Chicago-based Surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie, the "queen of the bohemian artists"
Published with Carnegie Museum of Art and Colby College Museum of Art.
This book is the definitive scholarly volume on Chicago artist Gertrude Abercrombie, who was a critical figure in the midcentury Chicago art and jazz scenes. Abercrombie was a creative force of singular vision who, from the 1930s until her death in 1977, produced enigmatic paintings full of personal significance. With a deft hand, a concise symbolic vocabulary and a restrained palette, she produced potent images that speak to her mercurial nature and her evolving psychology as an artist. Cats, owls, doors, moons, barren trees, seashells and searching female figures all converge in her mysterious works, which suggest a life of purposeful introspection and emotional struggle. Drawing consistently on her dreams as source material, Abercrombie said, "The whole world is a mystery."
Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery accompanies the artist’s first retrospective since 1991: an eponymous exhibition which begins at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh before traveling to the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Gertrude Abercrombie was born in 1909 in Austin, Texas, and spent most of her life in Chicago, focusing on her art full time beginning in the early 1930s. Her work was in part inspired by jazz, and she was the host of legendary parties and jam sessions frequented by icons such as Dizzy Gillespie, who was a close friend. She died in Chicago in 1977, at age 68.
