Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery

Apollo, January 10, 2025

She hosted parties and jazz sessions attended by figures including Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan and Thornton Wilder, all the while steadily gaining a reputation as a painter – a trajectory that reached its zenith in 1944, with a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Though apparently ebullient and sociable as a person, Abercrombie produced paintings with a sparse, gloomy quality, inspired by the Surrealist movement and populated by ghostly recurring images – cats, owls, bare trees, lone female figures, hats – that were often drawn from her own dreams. Many of her works recall the almost childlike eeriness of her contemporaries Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, both of which artists have seen growing critical and market interest in recent years. Abercrombie is yet to achieve their levels of fame – something the Carnegie Museum of Art may go some way to changing with this wide-ranging retrospective (co-organised by the Colby College Museum of Art), the most comprehensive display of her work yet (18 January–1 June).