The Emotionally Charged Paintings of Gertrude Abercrombie Finally Find Their Audience

Lisa Wong Macabasco, Vogue, March 10, 2025

Nearly 50 years after her death, this under-considered fixture of American Surrealism has recently seen a surge of interest following an acclaimed 2018 show at New York’s Karma gallery. Now a new touring exhibition invites viewers to meet the artist fully for the first time.

“Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery,” on view through June 1 at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, is the most comprehensive museum presentation of the artist’s work to date, with some 80 paintings from the late 1930s until her death in 1977 at age 68.

Abercrombie deployed a concise visual lexicon of personal symbols and a restrained sober palette across her paintings of interiors, landscapes, and still lifes, which were strewn with everyday objects and scenes—seashells, eggs, black cats, owls, snails, doors, bowls of fruit, Victorian furniture, bare trees, and moonlit landscapes among them. Although mined from her dreams with the aid of psychoanalysis, her works are grounded in the reality of her life experiences and emotional states (not to mention the flat Midwest landscape). “I try to make it real,” she said of her work. “I often find my paintings more real than the world around me.”