Gertrude Abercrombie

This book is the definitive scholarly volume on Chicago artist Gertrude Abercrombie, who was a critical figure in the midcentury Chicago art and jazz scenes. Abercrombie was a creative force of singular vision who, from the 1930s until her death in 1977, produced enigmatic paintings full of personal significance. With a deft hand, a concise symbolic vocabulary and a restrained palette, she produced potent images that speak to her mercurial nature and her evolving psychology as an artist. Cats, owls, doors, moons, barren trees, seashells and searching female figures all converge in her mysterious works, which suggest a life of purposeful introspection and emotional struggle. Drawing consistently on her dreams as source material, Abercrombie said, "The whole world is a mystery."
Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery accompanies the artist’s first retrospective since 1991: an eponymous exhibition which begins at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh before traveling to the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Gertrude Abercrombie was born in 1909 in Austin, Texas, and spent most of her life in Chicago, focusing on her art full time beginning in the early 1930s. Her work was in part inspired by jazz, and she was the host of legendary parties and jam sessions frequented by icons such as Dizzy Gillespie, who was a close friend. She died in Chicago in 1977, at age 68.

This book was published in conjunction with Carnegie Museum of Art; Colby College Museum of Art

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on the Chicago surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–77), a key figure in midcentury American surrealism. From the late 1930s until her death, Abercrombie made paintings populated by objects of personal significance—moons, towers, cats, pennants, Victorian furniture, shells, snails and doors—to create allegories for her own often precarious psychological states. Often presiding over these symbols was Abercrombie herself, who appears in numerous pictures as proud observer or witchy caricature.

Abercrombie exhibited in Chicago and New York in the 1940s and ‘50s, and her salon became a center of Midwestern culture, hosting jazz musicians (such as her close friend Dizzy Gillespie), writers and artists. This book includes new scholarship by Robert Cozzolino; a memoir of Abercrombie by Robert Storr; the artist's own writing; a definitive text by art historian Susan Weininger; and a memoir by the artist's daughter, Dinah Livingston.