---
title: "Gertrude Abercrombie, Chicago's Surrealist 'Jazz Witch,' Gets Her Due"
description: "The Chicago painter Gertrude Abercrombie spent her life making spare, dreamlike canvases of moons, cats and solitary figures — and hosting jazz greats in her Hyde Park home. Nearly 50 years after her death, a major museum retrospective is finally giving her the national recognition she long went without."
category: "Entertainment"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/entertainment
author: "Anjali Rao"
published: 2026-07-02T09:41:42.000Z
updated: 2026-07-02T09:41:42.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/gertrude-abercrombie-chicago-s-surrealist-jazz-witch-gets-her-due
tags: ["Gertrude Abercrombie", "art", "Surrealism", "jazz", "culture"]
---
# Gertrude Abercrombie, Chicago's Surrealist 'Jazz Witch,' Gets Her Due

The Chicago painter Gertrude Abercrombie spent her life making spare, dreamlike canvases of moons, cats and solitary figures — and hosting jazz greats in her Hyde Park home. Nearly 50 years after her death, a major museum retrospective is finally giving her the national recognition she long went without.

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](https://mam.org/exhibitions/whole-world/). 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](https://carnegieart.org/exhibition/gertrude-abercrombie/).

## 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](https://art.newcity.com/2026/03/24/the-jazz-witch-of-chicago-rises-how-the-gertrude-abercrombie-renaissance-is-reaching-a-new-apex-at-the-milwaukee-art-museum/). 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.

## Sources

- [Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery](https://mam.org/exhibitions/whole-world/)
- [The jazz witch of Chicago rises: the Abercrombie renaissance](https://art.newcity.com/2026/03/24/the-jazz-witch-of-chicago-rises-how-the-gertrude-abercrombie-renaissance-is-reaching-a-new-apex-at-the-milwaukee-art-museum/)
- [Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery](https://carnegieart.org/exhibition/gertrude-abercrombie/)