Gertrude Abercrombie Show Proves "The Whole World Is a Mystery"
Jeremy Lybarger, Art in America, March 26, 2025
“Everything is autobiographical in a sense but kind of dreamy. It’s way off in the skies,” the artist said, alluding to her methods as an engineer of uncanny nocturnes.
It’s true that Abercrombie didn’t camouflage the personal traces in her work. The bleached ruins of a slaughterhouse in Aledo, Illinois, her childhood hometown, are the subject of a painting from 1937. The eerie suitors and tense courtships throughout her art are allegories for her own jinxed marriages. And then there are the cats—dozens of them, prowling or stoic doppelgangers of the real-life felines who roamed Abercrombie’s Hyde Park Victorian.
Still, autobiography can’t account for the pervasive unreality of Abercrombie’s work in “The Whole World Is a Mystery,” a mesmerizing if prudishly designed retrospective at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh that gathers more than 80 Abercrombie paintings in the largest exhibition for the artist to date. Nor can it account for the vignettes that unfold as if by some narcotized logic. Her motifs—flags, dominoes, seashells, snails, moons, eggs, owls—only heighten the otherworldliness. In painting after painting, figures (mostly women, mostly solitary) seem bewitched as they trek across stark Midwestern landscapes, tarrying on some inscrutable errand. When Abercrombie does offer up interiors, they’re sparsely furnished and dingy, like rooms in a flophouse. Letters are sometimes depicted slipped under doors, bearing who knows what ominous or tragic summons. Paintings-within-paintings hang on her walls in a trippy hall-of-mirrors.