Gertrude Abercrombie (1909 - 1978)

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Gertrude Abercrombie (February 17, 1909 \u2013 July 3, 1977) was an American painter based in Chicago. Called "the queen of the bohemian artists", Abercrombie was involved in the Chicago jazz scene[ and was friends with musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughan, whose music inspired her own creative work.
Abercrombie was born on February 17, 1909, in Austin, Texas. Her parents, Tom and Lula Janes Abercrombie, were traveling opera singers who happened to be in Austin on the day of Gertrude's birth. The family lived in Berlin in 1913 to further her mother's career, but the beginning of World War I caused the family to move back to the United States.[4] Upon their return the family lived in Aledo, Illinois, before settling in Hyde Park, Chicago in 1916. She was raised in a strict Christian Scientist environment at home.

She earned a degree in Romance languages from the University of Illinois in 1929. After studying figure drawing briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago, she took a year-long course in commercial art at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, leading to her first job drawing gloves for Mesirow Department Store advertisements. She also worked briefly as an artist for Sears.

Fine art career
In 1932 she began to focus strictly on her art. The following summer she made her first sale at an outdoor art fair in Chicago and received an honorable mention in the newspaper for the event. In the mid-1930s she moved out of her family's home and became active in the regional art scene. From 1934 to 1940 she served as a painter for the Works Progress Administration and in 1934 the Chicago Society of Artists held a solo show of her work. During the 1930s and 1940s she also began creating woodcuts.

In 1940 she married lawyer Robert Livingston, and in 1942 gave birth to their daughter Dinah. In 1948 the couple divorced. That same year she married music critic Frank Sandiford, with Dizzy Gillespie performing at the wedding. The couple were active in the bohemian lifestyle and jazz scene of Chicago hence their connection with Gillespie. They met musicians through Sandiford and through Abercrombie's own skills as an improvisational pianist. The couple would divorce in 1964.

Dizzy Gillespie with Abercrombie on his birthday, 1964
Within Abercrombie's avant-garde social circle she was the inspiration for the song "Gertrude's Bounce" by Richie Powell, who claimed that she walked "just like the way the rhythm sounds in the Introduction", and she appeared as herself in James Purdy's Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue and as a fictional character in Purdy's Malcolm, Eustace Chisholm.[4]

Death
By the late 1950s, her health declined due to financial trouble, alcoholism, and arthritis, and she became reclusive. After 1959, her paintings diminished in number as well as scale. She required a wheelchair and was eventually bedridden. In the final year of her life, a major retrospective of her work was held at the Hyde Park Art Center.[4] She died in Chicago on July 3, 1977. Her will established the Gertrude Abercrombie Trust which distributed her work and the work of other artists she owned to cultural institutions throughout the Midwest.

Themes
She painted many variations of her favored subjects: sparsely furnished interiors, barren landscapes, self-portraits, and still-lifes. Many compositions feature a lone woman in a flowing gown, often depicted with attributes of sorcery: an owl, a black cat, a crystal ball, or a broomstick. These works were often self-portraits, as she stated in an interview with Studs Terkel shortly before her death: "it is always myself that I paint".[8] Tall and sharp-featured, she considered herself ugly;[9] in life she sometimes wore a pointed velvet hat to accentuate her witch-like appearance, "enjoy[ing] the power this artifice gave her over others who would fear or recoil from her". The 1940s and '50s are described as her most prolific and productive period; a time when she no longer painted many portraits, but retained the themes mentioned above.

Abercrombie's mature works are painted in a precise, controlled style. She took little interest in other artists' work, although she admired Magritte. Largely self-taught, she did not regard her lack of extensive formal training as a hindrance. She said of her work:

I am not interested in complicated things nor in the commonplace. I like and like to paint simple things that are a little strange. My work comes directly from my inner consciousness and it must come easily. It is a process of selection and reduction.

Her work evolved into incorporating her love for jazz music, inspired by parties and jam sessions she hosted in her Hyde Park home. Musicians such as Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Jackie Cain and the Modern Jazz Quartet were considered friends. Dizzy Gillespie described her "the first bop artist. Bop in the sense that she has taken the essence of our music and transported it to another art form".
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ON SURREALIST GERTRUDE ABERCROMBIE, QUEEN OF THE BOHEMIAN ARTISTS

NO ARTSPEAK, NO MANIFESTOS, NO ABSTRACTIONS, NO PRETENSION.

I paint the way I do because I\u2019m just plain scared.
I mean, I think it\u2019s a scream that we\u2019re alive at all\u2014don\u2019t you?

\u2013Gertrude Abercrombie

A girl walks across a barren yet somehow vital and stirring landscape beneath an overcast sky marked with dark, winged clouds and illuminated by a brilliantly bright full moon. Her arms are lost within a black blob of a jacket; her green, knee-length skirt is brushy and in motion. She is wearing black flats, and a little brimmed black hat perches on her brown, blunt-cut, shoulder-length hair. She is leaning forward, left to right, as is a large forked dead tree behind her. Its spare, dark, calligraphic limbs signal to the lone traveler. Behind it is a small, boxy blue building with a black door and two square windows. The building, the tree, and the young woman cast moon shadows, while in the distance, the benevolent lunar light caresses a tightly circled, even huddled grove of trees. The green of their clustered crowns echoes the green of the girl\u2019s skirt. Her face is minimally indicated; her large dark eyes predominate. The arresting simplicity and starkness, silence and vigilance, of this small, dark painting invite the viewer to see this young woman\u2019s solitary, meditative nocturnal walk as an archetypal journey, a coming-of-age quest. Intriguing in its alchemical mix of the obvious and the mysterious, Girl Searching is an essential piece in Gertrude Abercrombie\u2019s unique and transfixing autobiography-in-paintings.

Abercrombie was 36 years old when she painted Girl Searching in 1945. An established Chicago artist, a wife, and a mother, she was still searching for clarity and freedom to be fully herself. Abercrombie did not feel entirely comfortable in her own skin. She was not confident about love, marriage, or motherhood. She was insecure, often blue, lonely, angry, irascible, and narcissistic. She worked avidly, desperately, and defensively. Painting was her calling, her sanctuary, her armor, her therapy, her antidepressant, and her currency. Her reason for being. Her lifeline. Her promise of posterity. Abercrombie drank too much and altogether neglected her health. Her closest friends were gay men; she kept her distance from other women. She fed her cats more lavishly than her human friends. She had a sly, biting sense of humor and a zest for parties and mischief. She was musically gifted and wild for jazz. She hosted now-legendary jam sessions at her three-story Victorian brownstone in Chicago\u2019s lakefront Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side near the University of Chicago. Over the 15 years following her creation of Girl Searching, Abercrombie funneled joy and agony into hundreds of provocative paintings instantly recognizable as hers. She exhibited regularly, cruised the city in her vintage Rolls-Royce, and was featured in newspapers and magazines as journalists reveled in her enigmatic, even spooky art and her colorful life. Abercrombie\u2019s cherished title, Queen of the Bohemian Artists, was well-earned.

Artist, curator, and influential champion of Chicago artists Don Baum became a close and trusted friend of Abercrombie and, eventually, the executor of her estate. He described her as \u201cvery funny\u201d and \u201cgrouchy\u201d and \u201cvery introspective.\u201d He vividly remembers her house percolating with the energy of all kinds of people, jazz, art, and cats. Hers was a dynamic, unconventional household sustained by lodgers who ranged from University of Chicago students to renowned musicians and composers. \u201cShe played the piano, you know,\u201d Baum recalled, \u201cand there was nothing she liked more than to sit down at the piano with somebody like Dizzy or Miles standing near her playing their instruments. It was pretty wild.\u201d

Abercrombie\u2019s daughter, Dinah, her one child, sounding pretty jazzy herself, remembered her mother during these sessions: \u201cShe was gay and radiant at these. Yes, she was the center. She was happy and expansive and had wonderful exchanges with all these people. She was blooming, she was flying . . . and the sound of her laughter would float over the music and carry the party into her sky . . . She would be sailing in her element and this was her glory and this was in her paintings, too.\u201d

Abercrombie\u2019s natural \u201celement\u201d also included a veritable fountain of booze flowing beneath a haze of tobacco and marijuana smoke. Among Abercrombie\u2019s papers are photographs and letters documenting her close, loving friendships with frequent guests Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins. In his memoir What Is What Was (2002), Chicago writer Richard Stern records his University of Chicago colleague, Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, reminiscing, \u201cIt was wonderful then, good old Bohemian Chicago. I got in with Gertrude Abercrombie [the painter] and her crowd.\u201d Among the artist\u2019s papers is a note from the one and only Chicago-based oral historian and radio host, Studs Terkel: \u201cTo Queen Gertrude, You are regal\u2014And we love you\u2014Studs.\u201d

Photographs do not exactly confirm Abercrombie\u2019s regality. She does look thoughtful and self-possessed, and there are some elegant photographs of her and her handsome first husband, Robert Livingston. There are also some stylishly staged shots of the earnest artist seated before an easel, brush in hand, as though she\u2019s hard at work on a large self-portrait, in spite of being absurdly overdressed for the messiness of oil painting. And the painting is set within a large, showy frame; clearly it had been completed long before the photo shoot. No doubt impish Gertrude found this fakery hilarious. In other shots she looks shy, even apologetic. You can tell that she\u2019s rueful about her looks as she mugs and clowns for the judgmental camera. Pictures taken at parties capture her poised, attractive, camera-wooing friends looking splendidly at ease, while Gertrude stares at the camera with chagrin, curiously childlike in her reluctant compliance with the lens\u2019 demands. In one photograph she even lies flat on her back on the floor, ankles and wrists demurely crossed, while friends sit in a neatly composed group behind her, in perfect command of the situation while she, one assumes, pretends to have succumbed to way too much partying. Yet as fearful as she was of the pitiless camera, Abercrombie painted herself over and over again.

One of the most striking and seductive aspects of Abercrombie\u2019s oeuvre is her defining visual lexicon. Like a jazz musician improvising on certain rhythms, notes, and melodies, she riffs on a set of subjects, settings, objects, and colors that hold deeply personal and resonant meanings for her. Abercrombie created an incantatory repertoire of flatlands, the full moon, bare trees, white boulders, boxy little houses, paths, towers, windows, nearly empty rooms, paintings within paintings, letters, gloves, telephones, seashells, chairs, a Victorian chaise lounge, vases, flowers, a pedestal, cats, owls, and horses. Her stark landscapes are occupied by tall, slender, and, yes, regal female figures clad in long, simple, even penitential gowns. These women have large, dark, deep-set feline eyes. Their stances and gestures are formal, as though they are onstage or performing a ritual or casting a spell or serving as witness or guide. These highly stylized tableaux, with their repeated symbols and magical motifs, give Abercrombie\u2019s paintings the look and aura of hieroglyphics or tarot cards.

Her moody palette was just as carefully defined as her imagery. And though her distinctive twilight colors express her moods and feelings, they also mirror the Great Lakes light that makes the evening skies of northern Illinois and Chicago so unexpectedly luminescent, a redemptive spectrum of dusky grays, coral pinks, and precious turquoises gracing the grit of the city and the monotony of the featureless land. But the focus of Abercrombie\u2019s paintings are the longings and fears aroused by complex psychological quandaries. Her self-assigned mission was to issue meteorological reports from a stormy psyche.

The enigmatic themes, dreamy atmosphere, and thematic continuity of Abercrombie\u2019s work inspired critics to call her a Surrealist or a magic realist. And she agreed. On a scrap of paper she wrote, \u201cSurrealism is meant for me because I am a pretty realistic person but don\u2019t like all I see. So I dream that it is changed. Then I change it to the way I want it. It is almost always pretty real. Only mystery and fantasy have been added. All foolishness has been taken out. It becomes my own dream. Others may or may not get it. Or dig it.\u201d And for all the mystery of her paintings, the artist talked about them in the most matter-of-fact manner: \u201cI am not interested in complicated things nor in the commonplace, I like to paint simple things that are a little strange. My work comes directly from my inner conscious- ness and it must come easily. It is a process of selection and reduction.\u201d In 1952 Abercrombie told journalist Agnes Lynch, \u201cI like to paint mysteries or fantasies\u2014things that are real in the mind, but not real in the ordinary sense of the word.\u201d

No artspeak for Abercrombie. No manifestos, no abstractions, no pretension. She disliked such discourse, and there was nothing intellectual about her aesthetics. She did acknowledge that the artists Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dali might have \u201csomething to do\u201d with her work. Then she said, \u201cBut the big influence was the Belgian painter, [René] Magritte. When I saw his work, I said to myself, \u2018There\u2019s your daddy.\u2019 And I\u2019ve been working in that surrealist vein ever since.\u201d

When Abercrombie talked to Studs Terkel about her work, she said, \u201cEverything is autobiographical in a sense, but kind of dreamy.\u201d She disingenuously played the role of the primitive and the unschooled, as in this passage from an article in Chicago magazine: \u201cI always paint my face, I guess, when I paint people. It is the face I know best. And it\u2019s really the easiest for me because, you know, it is sort of like putting on makeup.\u201d

When Agnes Lynch interviewed Abercrombie at her home for the Chicago Sun-Times, she watched cats race around the artist\u2019s studio while the artist spoke about what Lynch described as Abercrombie\u2019s \u201crestrained palette\u201d: \u201c\u2018I think it is foolish to lay out all the colors on the palette indiscriminately,\u2019 Miss Abercrombie said. \u2018To me each color has a special meaning and until I \u201cfeel\u201d a color in an artistic sense, I just don\u2019t use it. Purple seems to be my new color, and I find it is getting into all my paintings.\u201d\u2019 Lynch introduces the artist\u2019s nine-year-old daughter: \u201cDinah takes an active interest in her mother\u2019s work, and it was she who helped to introduce a new color note in her mother\u2019s paintings when she asked her sometime ago to \u2018paint her a pink picture.\u2019\u201d

Abercrombie liked to tout her disinterest in technique as well as her lack of formal training. She never learned to properly use paints and other materials, and many of her paintings had to be painstakingly restored. As Don Baum observed, \u201cShe was no technician, believe me . . . She never really knew much about the craft of painting. It wasn\u2019t about that. It was about making her strange images.\u201d Abercrombie made the distinction between being a good painter and being a better artist, and it was the latter that she cared about. For her, making art was about emotion, perceptions, and ideas, not skill: \u201cSomething has to happen, and if nothing does, all the technique in the world won\u2019t make it.\u201d

As stylized and iconic as most of the far-from-lifelike figures in her paintings are, Abercrombie was in fact a gifted and expressive portraitist. Among her earlier works are lush, looser, more painterly, colorful, natural, and multidimensional paintings of friends and family. She captured the nuance of her subjects\u2019 temperaments, their living, breathing presence.

Abercrombie met writer Wendell Wilcox in 1934, when, as she wrote in her fragmented reminiscences, she was \u201crecovering from a case of collapsed love.\u201d The two became friends, and he later wrote, \u201cIt is a great pity that she did not do more portraits of other people. She is a very remarkable portrait painter. Some she painted out of love and some for friendship and a few on order for the sake of money. They are all remarkably revealing\u2014too revealing to the people who contracted to buy them and to be salable. Some rejected them. But Abercrombie felt that portraiture was not truly a branch of art and she disliked practicing it.\u201d

She was also, as others observed, just too darn self-involved to pay such concentrated attention to others. Even Abercrombie herself joked about her narcissism. She loved telling people, for example, about a postcard written by one friend, the artist Dudley Huppler, to another, the artist Karl Priebe: \u201cDear Karl, Took Gertrude to the Ballet last night. She didn\u2019t like it. She wasn\u2019t in it.\u201d The primary reason Abercrombie lost interest in painting others was because she needed to paint herself to survive her increasingly daunting life.

(From Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists. Used with permission of Bloomsbury. Copyright 2017 by Donna Seaman).

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