Gertrude Abercrombie
Paula Burleigh, Artforum, March 4, 2025
They are often entirely devoid of leaves, awkwardly truncated, and occasionally menacing. Their anthropomorphism becomes particularly apparent when they’re situated in relation to a singular human figure inside sparse, indeterminate landscapes, operating as protagonists alongside their bipedal counterparts. The animacy and agency of Abercrombie’s trees is undeniable, confirmed by a pair of intimately scaled paintings, Tree of Life: Parts 1 & 2, 1949–50. Both works feature male and female torsos terminating in boles, and trees held up by human feet. A preternaturally bright cloud appears in each of these eerily vacant tableaux, where dark skies are the only witnesses to these inexplicable pairings between flesh and flora.
Abercrombie explored a personal iconography that pictured a more-than-human world—one that was as marvelous as it was disquieting. Her strange trees commingled with a menagerie of objects and entities, including owls, cats, seashells, dice, towers, freestanding walls and doors, magicians, men who bore a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, ladders, eggs, moons, and tall, lithe, dark-haired women, the last of which were self-portraits.
The first nationally traveling retrospective of Abercrombie’s art to date, “The Whole World Is a Mystery,”curated by Eric Crosby and Sarah Humphreville (of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art and the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, respectively), charts her career in Chicago from the 1930s to the early ’70s. Abercrombie was born in 1909 in Austin. Her parents were traveling opera singers, and she experienced an itinerant early childhood, a lifestyle eventually curtailed by World War I. In 1915, the artist’s family moved to her father’s hometown—Aledo, Illinois—which Gertrude would come to identify with and visit as an adult, even though the Abercrombies relocated to the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago just one year later. Motifs from the artist’s photographs of Aledo appear in her paintings, such as an abandoned concrete slaughterhouse and, notably, a severely pruned tree. But the artist remained in Chicago, where she became a denizen of the city’s vibrant jazz scene and a beloved host to raucous salons for local creatives.