‘Her painting was her life and her life was painting'

Kerry Cardona, Chicago Reader, January 15, 2025

Desolate trees, doors, shells, chaise longues, eggs, pyramids, cats and owls, the phases of the moon, and women—mostly lone women, haunting a landscape or posing in a mysterious interior scene. These are some of the myriad symbols that the late artist Gertrude Abercrombie used in her work again and again. For the cerebral painter, exploring one’s inner psyche, one’s desires and dreams, was an endless fount of inspiration.

Opening January 18 at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, “Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery” serves as a timely opportunity to look anew at Abercrombie’s life and work.

“I’m just—in general—really interested in American artists who have otherwise been eclipsed from the standard art histories that we tell ourselves and that we learn,” says Eric Crosby, Henry J. Heinz II director at the Carnegie Museum of Art, who curated the show along with Lunder curator of American art Sarah Humphreville of the Colby College Museum of Art and Cynthia Stucki. “And I’m not so much interested in, say, taking an artist like Gertrude Abercrombie and inserting her into the canon, so much as just really exploring her own creativity, what propels the work forward, and what set her apart and made her such a special Chicago artist.”