Gertrude Abercrombie's Blues.
When Thornton Wilder and Gertrude Stein went jogging in Chicago, it was Surreal.
Gertrude Abercrombie, Out in the Country, 1939, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Surrealism: is it a school, a canon of works, an aesthetic? Its founding intellect, André Breton, was a fastidious groundskeeper, crafting manifestos, membership, and manifests of what was and was not Surreal. Living as we do on the other side of the psychedelic 60s, “surreal” has become nearly interchangeable with “trippy”—impossible weirdness. But intense strangeness misses a more important aspect of Surrealism, and though Breton would not have embraced either of these, the difference suggests another view: Surrealism as a method for processing trauma. That view certainly resonated with American curators in the 1930s and 40s for many of the same reasons it does today. And by that reckoning, it also embraces the work of artists of that time period who were far from Breton’s rosters and canons who nonetheless can be considered nothing other than Surrealists—artists like Gertrude Abercrombie.
II. Draw Better.
In 1930, Thornton Wilder was offered a part-time teaching position at the University of Chicago. “It’s absurd, but it’s very American and is exactly what I want.”1 Already a literary star for his 1927 novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (for which he won his first Pulitzer Prize), Wilder began sketching his most famous play. Our Town drips with American absurdity, and fits into the uncanny realism of the artists in his circle in Chicago. When Wilder’s old friend Gertrude Stein visited him in Chicago—according to one of Wilder’s students, the two went jogging together—he introduced the doyenne of modern art to local artist Gertrude Abercrombie.
Abercrombie—I’ll leave off the first names so we don’t get our Gertrudes mixed up—was midwestern by chance. Born in Austin in 1909 to itinerant opera singers, she lived in Berlin until the Great War sent her family to America, where they gradually found their way to Hyde Park. She studied Romance languages at the University of Illinois and took up painting, gleaning a modernist sensibility from visits to the Art Institute of Chicago. She showed portraits and rough-hewn modernist landscapes in group shows around town, and while Stein appreciated the work of this promising 26-year-old, she counseled Abercrombie to focus on what their friend Wilder called “the smallest events in our life”2—by turning inward, we can find the most uncanny subjects. And on top of that, Stein added: “Draw better.”
III. Our Towns, Ourselves.
It wasn’t a dismissal—or at least Abercrombie didn’t take it that way. The turn towards Surrealism was total and so natural that it seems to draw out the uncanny quality in Abercrombie’s earlier work. Where once she had painted quirky portraits, now she turned to self-portraiture to excavate her own id. Some of these paintings share a childlike imagination with Henri Rousseau, but often they meditate on dark themes, resonating with Frida Kahlo’s more haunting self-portraits. (There’s a spooky one coming up at auction this November 20th. I’ll bet it fetches a lot.).
Abercrombie had a lot to process—and what she didn’t channel into her paintings, she doused in alcohol. She was known for boozy, bohemian parties, and famously drove around in a smashed-up Rolls Royce. A series of marriages became unhappy ones and lead to divorces—but also to exciting new circles of friends. Her second marriage, to a jazz musician and critic, was officiated by Dizzy Gillespie, and her home became a salon for jazz musicians. Sarah Vaughan, Billy Holiday, Max Roach and Sonny Rollins were all friends, and Abercrombie was memorialized in jazz tunes and two novels.3 By the 1950s however, her coping mechanisms began to fail. Alone, running out of money, and increasingly bedridden, she became a recluse. She painted more seldom and at a smaller scale from a wheelchair, until her death at age 67.
The paintings are undeniably Surrealist in aesthetic, in philosophy, and process. But Dizzy Gillespie, after her death in 1977, gave her a different label. She was, in Gillespie’s esteem,
“The first bop artist. Bop in the sense that she has taken the essence of our music and transported it to another art form.”4
You have to look carefully to see it, but if you are patient with Abercrombie’s eery dreamscapes, it’s there: Surrealism as a balm against the blues.
It’s been . . . a week. In the fog, I managed to set this issue to launch at 6 PM instead of the usual 6 AM. Thanks to all the concerned readers this morning who wondered where their Hanging Papers was, and to the smaller number who wondered if I had simply given up the ghost. Walking pneumonia is sweeping through the household, but for now, I’m still on right side of the grass.
Thanks for reading. Join us next week for something even spookier: the impossible meeting of George Ault, Ralston Crawford, and Gertrude Abercrombie in a rural Michigan—forty years after all of their deaths!
Jonathan
Jonathan@JonathanMillerSpies.com
Thornton Wilder, “Preface to Three Plays: ‘Our Town,’ ‘By the Skin of our Teeth,’ ‘The Matchmaker,’” Thornton Wilder, Collected Plays and Writings on Theater.
Richard Powell’s “Gertrude’s Bounce”; James Purdy’s Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue and Malcolm, Eustace Chisholm.
As quoted in by Susan Weininger and Kent Smith in Gertrude Abercrombie, 1991, p. 79.