Gertrude Abercrombie liked to call herself a witch, and her paintings can feel like spells: small, still canvases of moons and masks, cats and empty doorways, and lone women in hushed interiors. For decades her reputation barely traveled beyond Chicago. Now a sweeping retrospective is arguing she belongs in the front rank of American Surrealists.
The show
"Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery" gathers roughly 80 of her paintings — billed as the largest assembly of her work ever mounted — at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where it runs through mid-July, the museum says. Co-organized with the Carnegie Museum of Art and Colby College Museum of Art, the traveling exhibition frames her not as a regional curiosity but as a singular figure who fused Surrealism with a distinctly American sensibility, the Carnegie notes.
A life at the center of the scene
Born in 1909 and largely self-taught, Abercrombie made her four-story home in Hyde Park a hub of Chicago's bohemian and jazz worlds. Musicians passing through the city gathered there, and she counted figures of the bebop era among her friends — a connection captured in the nickname that has attached to her revival, the "jazz witch of Chicago," as Newcity put it. Her home, admirers note, offered Black musicians a welcoming space in an era of segregation. She kept working, on an intimate scale and a muted palette, until her death in 1977.
Why now
Abercrombie's rediscovery is part of a broad, years-long reassessment of women Surrealists once pushed to the margins of art history. A 2018 gallery show in New York helped rekindle interest, and museums have since worked to bring overlooked figures back into view; her prices at auction have climbed as the reappraisal has taken hold, per the Newcity account. The Milwaukee retrospective reads less as a market event than as a correction — a belated argument that a painter who spent her life making mysteries in a Chicago living room was quietly building an American body of work worth seeing whole. As one of her own titles has it: the whole world is a mystery.
