Gertrude Abercrombie
The Jazz Witch
Earlier this week I gave an online talk for the wonderful The Last Tuesday Society about Gertrude Abercrombie (if you attended, thank you! If not, it will be available on-demand soon). I’ve since received some really lovely messages from friends and acquaintances whose interest in Abercrombie — an Surrealist artist known for her renditions of solitary women, cats, owls, and doors, who is often referred to as a Jazz Witch, or The Bohemian Queen of Chicago — has been piqued, even solely from the images I shared on social media. (I wrote a little about her here last year, but this was much more in-depth). So, I thought I would share a small, very heavily edited, extract of my script. Obviously I cannot post the entire 5000 word piece here, and the email will cut probably cut-off beyond a certain number of words and images, so this is pretty brief, but it’s still a little taster.
In the Abercrombie chapter of her book, Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists, Donna Seaman wrote the following:
Abercrombie's paintings create an episodic one-woman show illuminating the artist's struggles with the perplexities of the self, love, marriage, motherhood, captivity and freedom, inheritance and independence, loneliness and abandonment; her pursuit of beauty and magic, her guiding dreams, and the refuge she found in humor. Abercrombie's paintings are bewitching, enigmatic, elegant, awkward, eerie, funny, clever, sad, anguished, teasing, and playful. She was hardworking, diligent, and ambitious, famously social and generous, musical, warm, and witty. She was also depressed, irritable, self-conscious, self-deprecating, self-destructive, angry, sharp-tongued, stingy, and reclusive.
-Donna Seaman.
Of her work Abercrombie once said: “everything is autobiographical in a sense, but kind of dreamy.” She was agreed with the description of her artwork as Surrealism. One time she wrote on a scrap of paper,
“Surrealism is meant for me because I am a pretty realistic person but I don’t like all I see. So I dream that it is changed. Then I change it to the way I want it. It is always almost pretty real. Only mystery and fantasy have been added. All foolishness has been taken out. It becomes my own dream. Others may or may not get it. Or dig it.”
Abercrombie counted Dorothea Tanning as an acquaintance, and called Salvador Dalí and Giorgio di Chirico influences. She once said that the first time she saw a Magritte artwork “I said to myself, ‘There’s your daddy.’” From this realisation, she started to paint in a more Surrealistic vein.
Abercrombie’s paintings are not so much automatic creations in typical Surrealists fashion, but they are not overtly methodical either. Her work is a conjuring. As James Purdy said, “she is a bruja, of course ... she only appears once in a hundred years, but when she does even time stands still.’
Despite her unofficial role as Salonnière holding court in her home for Chicago’s interracial jazz scene, Abercrombie was riddled with internal turmoil. Seaman notes she ‘maintained a flinty, joshing, good-time facade, but she was pierced and wounded by every slight and disappointment, every loss and lie. She needed protection, and her house became her fortress, her paintings her shields, her persona as queen her jeweled shell.’
Abercrombie allegedly played up her witchy association. She painted herself as a fortune teller, and in 1952’s Untitled (Ballet For Owl) appears to be doing a magic spell on stage, aided by an assisting owl. In Leviathan (1952) she levitated in the glow of the moonlight.
As Robert Cozzolino wrote in his paper, ‘The ‘Sorceress in the Center of Everything,’ Abercrombie’s work are small conjurings.’ When asked on one occasion if she had been dabbling in the dark arts to generate her ideas Abercrombie responded,
“No, nothing like that. They just…appear. The strange thing is, once I paint something, it usually turns up in real life. For example, that marble-topped counter there. It popped up in a painting I did. Then, a few weeks later I saw it in a shoemaker’s shop. Naturally, he had to sell it to me. After all, I had painted it!”
Abercrombie exhibited her work throughout the 1950s in solo exhibitions both in the Midwest and on the east coast, including at the Bresler Gallery in Milwaukee, the Newman Brown Gallery and Illinois Design Center in Chicago, and Edwin Hewitt Gallery in New York. One of her most known and loved works was created around this time. In Countess Nerona #3 a woman reclines on a green chaise gesticulating in the direction of an alert white cat, who appears to be listening intently. In this painting. The artwork was painted as Abercrombie’s health began to decline, in part due to her alcohol dependency, and even after a gall-bladder surgery in 1959, she continued to neglect her health.
In 1977, following her retrospective at the Hyde Park Art Center, Gertrude Abercrombie passed away. As is always the way, her name and acclaim grew after her death, especially during the 1980s and 1990s. A 2018 solo show at New York’s Karma gallery also saw Abercrombie’s fame grow in the U.S. In his review of the 1977 exhibition, the critic and curator Dennis Adrian wrote,
her work itself is painstaking, exacting and personal; it is perhaps more privately mystical than surrealist…there is a special quality of her personal artistic statement, her involvement with contemporary American art other than her own field, and her confident commitment to our city’s rambunctiously active culture. Because of all this Gertrude Abercrombie deserves the fullest respect as one of our greatest painters.
I will leave you with this lovely, most perfect example, titled Interior with balloon and black cat from 1951. A female figure, likely Abercrombie herself, sits in quiet room, holding a green balloon. If you look closely, you can detect an ever so slight smile on her face, a lovely look of contentment. She is alone with her tiny black cat on her lap, and her hand gently rests on her lovely little feline. I ponder whether she is having a quiet celebration for herself and her animals, or if the balloon was acquired at one of her legendary parties. I hope she was celebrating. She deserves to be celebrated.
“Queen Gertrude rules; long live the queen.”
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Just posted a tiny thing about surrealism and had forgotten about her. Thank you!
Loved this and linked to it https://themidpoint.substack.com/p/subject-matter xx