Gertrude Abercombie, “The Church,” 1938. Oil on canvas. 18 x 24 in. (45.7 x 61 cm). Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photo by Edward C. Robison III

Gertrude Abercrombie’s body of work incorporates dreamlike images of spare interiors, stark landscapes and enigmatic self-portraits. As a leading figure in the Hyde Park art set, she enjoyed a local following for her work and was a figure in the visual art and jazz music communities from the 1930s into the 1970s in Chicago. During a quiet period after her death, Abercrombie’s work was off to the side of the mainstream. An important gallery show in New York in 2018 renewed interest in her career, which has climbed steadily. And now a museum exhibition should help reintroduce her work to the public as well as demonstrate the reason for the intense and growing interest in her aesthetic ideas.

A major traveling retrospective of the work of Abercrombie (1909-1977) runs through July 19 at the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM), presenting an excellent opportunity for people in the region to learn more about this late Chicago-based painter. Abercrombie, frequently aligned with the Surrealism movement, launched her painting career from her home in Hyde Park, where she lived and worked for most of her life and until her death. “Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World is a Mystery” was co-organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Colby College Museum of Art. At nearly eighty paintings from major museums and private collections, it is the largest show of her work ever organized. Its presentation at MAM is the retrospective’s only Midwest venue.

Gertrude Abercombie, “Levitation,” 1967. Oil on Masonite. 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm). Private Collection, Illinois. Photo by Michael Tropea

Abercrombie was born in Austin, Texas to traveling opera singer parents while they were on tour. At the onset of World War I, the family moved near the Quad Cities to her father’s hometown of Aledo, Illinois. In 1916, they relocated to Hyde Park, which was to become Abercrombie’s lifelong base. After receiving a degree in romance languages from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Abercrombie studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. By 1932, she was focused on making art and then served as a painter for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration from 1934 to 1940. In 1936 and 1938, her work was included in the Art Institute of Chicago’s “Annual Exhibition of Works by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity,” winning awards, and she also exhibited in commercial galleries and group exhibitions with the Chicago Society of Artists. In the 1940s, she had solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Public Library (in the building that is now the Chicago Cultural Center) and also participated in group exhibitions at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1944, her work was included in the Art Institute of Chicago’s “55th Annual Exhibition of American Painting and Sculpture.”

She married for the first time in 1940 and that union produced her daughter and ended in divorce in 1948. In that same year, Abercrombie married the music critic Frank Sandiford, who introduced her to a group of jazz musicians. She was an improvisational pianist and her home became a site for jazz, parties for many nationally known performers, and even temporary lodgings as musicians came through Chicago. Dizzy Gillespie became a close friend and she also knew Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins and Sarah Vaughan.

“The Church” (1938), from early in her career, presents a figure in the center of a barren landscape looking at a white church in the distance. The ground cover is green, but the trees appear dead. This female is of indeterminate age as she faces away from the viewer. She wears the long, formal gloves of a mature woman, but also the white stockings and flat shoes of a girl. The storm clouds and foreboding sky imply that the chapel may not be the welcoming place of refuge one would expect. The dirt path seems to be pulling the woman toward the church as if she is on a moving walkway, taking her straight into the open door of the chapel at the dead center of the composition. This scene recalls the landscape of her father’s hometown, but at the same time, it also suggests that some kind of natural disaster has occurred.

Abercrombie was tall and her sharp facial features, which included a protruding chin, made her appear witch-like to some people and her mother always made her feel plain. She took ownership of this and often depicted herself in self-portraits and as the main character in interior and exterior compositions with the appearances and accoutrements of sorcery, such as black hats, black cats, and brooms. In doing this, Abercrombie was not unlike some contemporary artists whose work deconstructs our relationships with the media and how we project our personal images into the world as she created an alter ego for herself. Women in floor-length gowns frequently walk through her landscapes and interiors in dreamlike trances with arms outstretched, seeking something or beseeching someone. These connections to the occult and peculiar forces in the world—both those inside one’s own mind and those imposed on us from the outside—worked in her favor by extending the surrealistic content of her dream imagery beyond the paintings to make a more direct connection with the viewer. For example, is the woman in “The Church” carrying a bare branch she has innocently picked up from one of the trees or is it a witch’s switch and is she heading to the church for some kind of confrontation? We can never know for certain and this is part of what makes her work compelling.

She did not have a formal degree in art. Abercrombie embraced this in a personal style that combined meticulously rendered objects arranged in minimal compositions in ways that, at first, might suggest that some of her paintings have a connection to those of self-taught and outsider artists. However, her pieces are filled with personal symbols and objects that demonstrate her understanding of psychology, giving them an air of mystery and an unusual ability to communicate dreamlike states that make her paintings difficult to categorize as one particular style. The reception for her work within the Chicago arts community in those decades readily demonstrates that while her pieces were puzzling and challenging, defying easy analysis, she was definitely working on the inside rather than outside of the contemporary visual arts field.

Gertrude Abercombie, “A Picture in a Picture in a Picture,” 1955. Oil on Masonite. 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm). Private Collection. Courtesy of Sullivan Goss Gallery

Abercrombie made large aesthetic statements in works that were average to very modest in scale. In fact, her miniature works—eight-by-ten inches and smaller—are some of her strongest pieces. When confronting these small-scale compositions, the viewer can feel as though they are pulled into the work, drawn by the secrets Abercrombie puts forth with the intimacy of a whisper. By this time in her career, she had created a well-established group of motifs that would recur in her work, including shells, eggs, doors, bowls of fruit and Victorian furniture and landscapes. “A Picture in a Picture in a Picture” (1955) presents what at first appears to be a succession of images of an empty room with a green chaise, and a painting hanging on the wall behind the couch, depicting the same scene. But upon closer examination, differences become apparent. In the main composition, the door that opens into the room is closed, and an envelope has been pushed under the door and lies on the floor. In the repeated scene hanging on the wall, the chaise and door are still present, but there is no envelope. The door is open to another room, and the painting on this wall depicts an owl.

The 1950s were a particularly fertile time for Abercrombie and many of the pieces for which she is known were created during this period. She admired the work of René Magritte (1898-1967) and while this painting has some of the mysterious disorientation his work is known for, there is also a sense of sly playfulness that one can find in Magritte pieces and that Abercrombie injects at times into her work. In visually excavating the layers of repeated images in “A Picture in a Picture in a Picture,” being puzzled about its meaning can also lead one to bemusement.

Like a number of Midwestern artists working in the 1930s through the 1960s who were influenced by Surrealism, she has also been considered by some to be a Magic Realist and Abercrombie could occupy a space in-between the two schools of art. The styles are related but slightly different. Surrealism was a leading force in contemporary art during those same decades and a truly international movement. Its artists sought to unlock the power of the subconscious mind by depicting illogical scenes recalling dreams and nightmares in which they placed unrelated objects together to emphasize a sense of strangeness and suggest personal connotations within the images. Magic Realism’s proponents created extremely realistic scenes that they interrupted with illogical elements. This movement’s proponents focused on finding the “magic” or “peculiarities” in reality rather than exploring the subconscious. While Surrealists focused on the world of the unconscious, Magic Realists sought to depict the bizarreness within the real world rather than escaping it. Although she had close friends and colleagues who were active as Magic Realists, in the end, Abercrombie functions much more as a Surrealist.

Gertrude Abercombie, “Doors, 4 (5 ½),” 1957. Oil on board, 6 x 8 in. (15.2 x 20.3 cm). Collection of Shio Kusaka and Jonas Wood. Photo by Marten Elder; Courtesy of Karma Gallery

“Doors, 4 (5 1/2)” (1957) presents another subtly jarring image of a wall of closed portals. They block one’s entry but also provide a sense of security. We are always curious about what lies on the other side of a closed door and there is a combined quality of escape and entrapment, danger and safety, surrounding how we use these gateways to move from space to space and interior to exterior. This work suggests some of the sense of potential and menace portals can present as seen in Frank R. Stockton’s 1882 short story, “The Lady, or the Tiger?” In reality, Abercrombie would also have seen these salvaged remnants of former buildings at construction sites in Chicago where contractors fashioned them into fencing to keep the public out. Her doors do not appear to be attached to a jamb or even a building, for that matter. They are butted together, becoming a wall of their own making and she uses them to offer her viewer a chance and to pose a question—do you walk out or let something in?

In the late 1950s, Abercrombie experienced health challenges including attacks of pancreatitis, gallbladder surgery, arthritis and alcoholism, all of which took a toll. Her production of work fell off and she became more reclusive. She and Sandiford divorced in 1966. In the 1970s, she assembled a sizable collection of her own work. The curator and artist Don Baum (1922-2008) organized a major retrospective of her career which the Hyde Park Art Center hosted in early 1977. She died that July. Baum was the trustee of her estate and following her wishes, distributed Abercrombie’s works to museums around the Midwest, as well as examples of works by other artists that she owned. Her paintings are in Midwest public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago and Milwaukee Art Museum as well as in the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. From the 1980s through the early 2000s, Abercrombie pieces would turn up in group exhibitions at museums and also at auction in Chicago. She was quietly acquired by private collectors and was still well-known to Chicago-area museum curators. Now, in the past eight years, Abercrombie’s work has been exposed to subsequent generations of artists and collectors, finding new and appreciative audiences.

If artists are the one group of humans to have immortality because their works last beyond their time on earth, Gertrude Abercrombie is having a successful afterlife. Karma, a Manhattan-based gallery hosted a solo show in 2018 of nearly seventy of Abercrombie’s paintings that presented her to the New York art community for the first time since 1952. Karma published a detailed catalogue in connection with the show, which was favorably reviewed by Roberta Smith in the New York Times. In a few short years, interest in Abercrombie’s career has grown year after year. Museums include her work in group exhibitions and pieces that come up for auction that are estimated to sell in the multiple thousands have been selling in the low-to-high six figures. Viewers have become highly intrigued by the work of the woman who has been called “the Queen of Chicago” and “the jazz witch.”

Some of the possible reasons for this explosion of interest are the ways the art world evolves and revolves over time and also forces that have collided, without prior intent or planning, to bring about a major reevaluation of Abercrombie’s work. Dedicated collectors seek undiscovered or neglected talents they can champion. Although Abercrombie was collected in Chicago, her fame did not spread very far from home.

A field-wide renewed interest in calling attention to the work of contemporary women artists in art museums and commercial galleries since 2020 has meant that professionals in the field have been actively seeking women artists whose work they could introduce (or reintroduce) to the public. In addition, Surrealism—especially works by women Surrealists—has become a popular subject for museum exhibitions around the world. This has positively affected the way in which works in this style have performed at auction in the last five years. This performance has influenced commercial galleries to support Surrealism’s women artists, which encourages more museum presentations and the cycle repeats. As often happens in the art world, times and interests change and Abercrombie, with her fascinating backstory, is riding the crest of a wave that, so far, does not appear to be subsiding.

John Wilde (American, 1919–2006), “Karl Priebe, Gertrude Abercrombie, Dudley Huppler, Marshall Glasier, Sylvia Fein, a Friend, Arnold Dadian and Myself,” 1966. Oil on panel. 8 × 12 in. (20.32 × 30.48 cm). Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of the Gertrude Abercrombie Trust, M1979.33. Photo by P. Richard Eells © John Wilde

In its American Art wing, MAM has organized an additional exhibition that documents a portion of Abercrombie’s life and career that adds to greater understanding of this artist. In a vest-pocket gallery, the museum is presenting seventeen works from its permanent collection that document a circle of artists who were friends in the 1940s through the 1960s and who lived in the Chicago, Madison and Milwaukee areas. While a number of artists are included, the core members of this group are Sylvia Fein (1919-2024), Marshall Glasier (1902-1988), Dudley Huppler (1917-1988), Karl Priebe (1914-1976), John Wilde (1919-2006) and Abercrombie. The MAM show is an offshoot of the 2005 exhibition, “With Friends,” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elvehjem Museum of Art (now the Chazen Museum of Art). That exhibition documented the works of these six artists and detailed their interrelationships and the supportive community they established to encourage each other’s artistic efforts. Abercrombie, Priebe and Wilde were particularly close, corresponding almost daily, and often discussing the development of pieces, talking about exhibitions, and offering each other inspiration and motivation.

Wilde spent his career teaching drawing at UW-Madison and was, until recently, the best-known member of the group. He was an accomplished draftsman in both graphite and silverpoint. His drawings and paintings contained dreamlike scenes set in rural landscapes and domestic environments in which he combined images of play, sexuality and violence that were executed with a steady, accomplished hand and an inventive mind. His landscapes recall the detailed depictions in the backgrounds of Northern Renaissance paintings. His scenes with figures have some commonalities with Abercrombie’s dream images but his compositions are more complex with action taking place that is sometimes violent and threatening. Like Abercrombie, he also created still life compositions and while hers held a sense of the symbolic significance of each item, Wilde’s, using the approach of a Magic Realist, frequently sought something slightly off or strange within the fruit and vegetables that he rendered “realistically.” Wilde, who was avidly collected through much of his career, is included in many major museum collections and had regular gallery representation in the Midwest as well as in New York. As in much of the history of art, Wilde, as a male artist, would have brought Abercrombie’s work to greater attention through their association, but in one of those stories that seems unique to the current art world, the tables have turned, as her work is now ascending more quickly. One of his oils in this show, “Karl Priebe, Gertrude Abercrombie, Dudley Huppler, Marshall Glasier, Sylvia Fein, a Friend, Arnold Dadian, and Myself” (1966), has become a historic documentation of the relationships of these six friends and their friend Dadian. They stand together in small groups, on an elaborately patterned black-and-white tile floor (with the painting’s date inscribed on the tiles) as if at a museum opening. Wilde adds his own spin to this “realistic” portrait by adding the “friend,” who recalls one of the nude female sprites that fill many of his paintings. Another significant part of this story is that this painting belonged to Abercrombie and she donated it to MAM posthumously through her trust.

Priebe and Abercrombie were very close. He was the most social member of this group and had connections with collectors, supporters and artists in the gay and straight communities in Chicago, Milwaukee and New York. The two met in Chicago in the early 1930s when Priebe came to study at the School of the Art Institute and they became lifelong friends. He was also interested in jazz, hosting musicians in his home when they visited Milwaukee. Priebe was a welcome member of Milwaukee’s Black community. Working in painted media and drawings, his choices of subject matter were portraits of people and depictions of animals—especially birds. Both subjects were presented in compositions in which they were in the foreground with a nonspecific background barely suggesting an interior or landscape. He had an unusual color sense, highlighting portions of figures and feathers with heightened, almost neon-bright touches of color against backgrounds that were muted or even dark at times. Some of his depictions suggest mythological imagery and he had the reputation of working in the vein of fantasy in addition to being a Magic Realist. Priebe was well-known for his sensitive portraits of Black Americans at a time when they were not often seen on the walls of museums and major galleries. Priebe is having a renewal himself as sales of his work climb as he is discovered by a younger generation of collectors. His ability to live authentically in so many communities at the same time during his life—gay, straight, wealthy collectors, musicians, Black Americans—has created an interest in him and in the ways he presented his subjects. The MAM exhibition also includes a brooding portrait of Abercrombie by Priebe, another gift from her estate to the art museum in his hometown.

Gertrude Abercombie, “Letter from Karl,” 1940. Oil on canvas. 24 x 30 in. (61 x 76.2 cm). Union League Club of Chicago.

Abercrombie also joined her friends in making work that referred to them and their relationships. “Letter from Karl” (1940), is one of her still-life pieces that refers directly to Priebe. In this work, a white vase with white carnations fills the right half of the image. The left side is split into two distinct rectangles—a painting of one of her dream scenes hangs on the wall behind the table on which the vase rests and an envelope lies on the table beneath the painting. The carnations jut out of the vase in ways that make sense yet are also somehow strange. While the painting on the wall is of interest, the envelope really becomes the main attraction. It is clearly addressed to Abercrombie and has been sent by “KP,” as stated in the return address. In this, she recalls the work of William Michael Harnett (1848-1892) who pioneered trompe l’oeil still-life painting in late-nineteenth-century American art with compositions that contained letters and money so realistic they appeared to have been collaged rather than painted. Although there is a Magritte-like sense of poetry about the objects she has rendered, this piece is also an opportunity for Abercrombie to publicly acknowledge her personal friendship with Priebe and their ongoing correspondence.

Abercrombie was not a careerist in the contemporary sense, in that she actively exhibited and sold her work locally but she did not push her career in ways that would have carried her fame beyond Chicago. In the long run this may have served her well by having her emerge decades after her death with the cachet of a somewhat overlooked talent on the national stage. In addition, her legacy in her home city has also secured a place of additional importance for her. In her last decades, and in subsequent exhibitions after her death, Abercrombie communicated with a younger generation of artists whose work is also figurative, focused on portraiture, the depiction of objects as signifiers, and an interest in a personal interpretation of Surrealistic influences—the Chicago Imagists. While one cannot always draw a straight line connecting her work to that of the members of the Hairy Who or the larger community of Imagists, they do share common themes and interests. They also have one major thing in common: the Hyde Park Art Center has been the institution that nurtured both Abercrombie and the early years of the Imagists. Although Abercrombie was not wholly forgotten, we will benefit from the increased attention focused on her work and its role in the development of subsequent generations of artists in the Midwest in general and Chicago in particular. Thanks to this, the “Queen of Chicago” will continue to fascinate her subjects for years to come.

These two exhibitions will continue at the Milwaukee Art Museum through July 19, 2026. For more information visit, visit mam.org.

Published in the print edition of the April 2026 issue, with the headline “The Jazz Witch of Chicago Rises: How the Gertrude Abercrombie Renaissance Is Reaching a New Apex at the Milwaukee Art Museum.”