A Spellbinding Retrospective Showcases Artist and Jazz Witch Gertrude Abercrombie's Singular Vision
Elisa Carollo, Observer, March 7, 2025
There’s something ominous and deeply mysterious—as unsettling as a sudden shiver, yet as revelatory as an epiphany—in the modestly scaled surrealist paintings of American artist Gertrude Abercrombie. She spent more than four decades, from 1930 to 1970, constructing an exquisitely precise yet deeply personal symbolic lexicon—like a map of her subconscious or a diary of her dreams. Her world is one of enigmatic and obscure presences: an owl, a cat, a seashell, closed doors framing solitary human figures in desolate nocturnal landscapes or oppressive domestic interiors. These spaces serve as theatrical settings, each scene unfolding with the charged tension of a crime story. Suspended in time and space, Abercrombie’s images operate like puzzles of symbols, waiting for the right sequence to unlock their meaning. Everything exists in a state of becoming, shifting and transforming in a performance of dissonant symbols, improvising, mutating, repeating and reinventing, as in a jazz jam session. Her paintings, an urgent manifestation of the subconscious, expose the inherent arbitrariness of the meanings we attach to language, symbols and the physical world around us. Oscillating between interior and exterior realms, between imagination and lived experience, Abercrombie’s reality is both profoundly intimate and strikingly universal.
A major survey—the first in decades—dedicated to Abercrombie’s enigmatic, witch-like oeuvre is now on view at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. The show builds on and reinforces the recent rediscovery of her singular body of work, aligning with a broader surge of interest in the women of Surrealism—an overdue recognition that has driven rising prices and significant institutional attention in recent years. Co-organized with the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine, to which it will travel this summer, this long-awaited exhibition assembles key loans from both museums and private collections and marks the first institutional retrospective of Abercrombie’s work since 1991 and the first to tour across the United States.