Not Good Painting, But Good Art: A Review of "Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery"
Joseph Cothrel, New City Lit, February 13, 2025
In January, the most comprehensive exhibition of her work opened at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and will travel to the Colby College Museum of Art and the Milwaukee Art Museum over the next two years. The catalog for this show provides the best opportunity yet to explore the life, work and legacy of this one-of-a-kind Chicago artist.
Eric Crosby of Carnegie and Sarah Humphreville of Colby have put together a dynamite volume of essays and images, including more than 200 color images and a wealth of black-and-white photographs of Abercrombie and her circle. And what a circle it was, ranging from musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and the Modern Jazz Quartet to mid-century literary figures like Thornton Wilder, James Purdy and Saul Bellow. If anyone ever writes a history of Chicago bohemian epicenters, Abercrombie’s home at 5728 South Dorchester in Hyde Park will rank right up there.
The editors’ opening essays ground us in the facts. Crosby addresses the style and features of Abercrombie’s work and artistic context from which she emerged. Humphreville delves deeper into the artist’s life and development. Important essays situating Abercrombie and her art within the worlds of jazz and queer culture are also here, as well as an interview Studs Terkel conducted shortly before Abercrombie’s death in 1977, capturing the artist’s amusingly frank manner of speech. As a final chapter, Cynthia Stucki’s chronology of Abercrombie’s life doubles as a detailed and succinct account of a little slice of semi-lost Chicago cultural history.