BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 7.25 x 9 in. / 488 pgs / 223 color / 29 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 10/23/2018
Out of stock indefinitely

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2019 p. 19

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781949172027 TRADE
List Price: $50.00 CDN $69.95

AVAILABILITY
Not available

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KARMA, NEW YORK

Gertrude Abercrombie

Edited by Dan Nadel. Text by Robert Storr, Susan Weininger, Robert Cozzolino, Dinah Livingston. Interview with Studs Terkel.

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on the Chicago surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–77), a key figure in midcentury American surrealism. From the late 1930s until her death, Abercrombie made paintings populated by objects of personal significance—moons, towers, cats, pennants, Victorian furniture, shells, snails and doors—to create allegories for her own often precarious psychological states. Often presiding over these symbols was Abercrombie herself, who appears in numerous pictures as proud observer or witchy caricature.

Abercrombie exhibited in Chicago and New York in the 1940s and ‘50s, and her salon became a center of Midwestern culture, hosting jazz musicians (such as her close friend Dizzy Gillespie), writers and artists. This book includes new scholarship by Robert Cozzolino; a memoir of Abercrombie by Robert Storr; the artist's own writing; a definitive text by art historian Susan Weininger; and a memoir by the artist's daughter, Dinah Livingston.

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

New York Times

Roberta Smith

Abercrombie was at the hub of several overlapping cultural circles, and her Chicago was at the center of everything.

The New Yorker

Johanna Fateman

Ambercrombie practices her own strain of Surrealism; like Margritte she loved doors to nowhere and playing tricks with scale.

Bookforum

Canada Choate

The bulk of the paintings reprinted in this survey, which spans from 1933 to 1971, convey the artist's image of herself as a lonely necromancer, accompanied on life's journey only by her familiars in the form of cats, seashells, and switches.