Gertrude Abercrombie's American Surrealism

Ed Simon, Hyperallergic, February 25, 2025

PITTSBURGH — In 1935, a 26-year-old largely self-taught painter named Gertrude Abercrombie accompanied her friend, the writer Thorton Wilder, to a lecture at the University of Chicago in her native Hyde Park. There, she would meet the lecturer who would become a lifelong influence and mentor of sorts: Gertrude Stein. An irascible American modernist who not only revolutionized poetry but cultivated a salon of artists as an émigré in Paris, Stein told Abercrombie, “You gotta draw better.” 

Drawing, however, was always secondary to painting for Abercrombie — it was her stark compositions with their idiosyncratic and personal visual vocabulary made up of recurring owls and cats, doors and moons, that made her such a fascinating figure within American surrealism. “Art has to be real crazy, real personal and real real, or it is nowhere,” Abercrombie once wrote. Hers certainly was. Unjustly marginalized since her death in 1977, which occurred due to an addiction to alcohol and after nearly two decades of producing few works, Abercrombie, and her arresting oeuvre will hopefully be discovered by a new audience in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s comprehensive retrospective, The Whole World Is a Mystery. 

Abercrombie wasn’t one to take Stein’s critique personally, and she fashioned herself into the “other Gertrude,” hosting her own salons in her Chicago brownstone. Luminaries of the bebop jazz avant-garde counted themselves members of this confraternity, including Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie. Feted as the “Queen of the Bohemians,” the tall, skinny, and angular Abercrombie saw herself as a kind of jazz witch forging her dream visions into a strange, eerie, and occult body of work. 

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