There’s something ominous and deeply mysterious—as unsettling as a sudden shiver, yet as revelatory as an epiphany—in the modestly scaled surrealist paintings of American artist Gertrude Abercrombie. She spent more than four decades, from 1930 to 1970, constructing an exquisitely precise yet deeply personal symbolic lexicon—like a map of her subconscious or a diary of her dreams. Her world is one of enigmatic and obscure presences: an owl, a cat, a seashell, closed doors framing solitary human figures in desolate nocturnal landscapes or oppressive domestic interiors. These spaces serve as theatrical settings, each scene unfolding with the charged tension of a crime story. Suspended in time and space, Abercrombie’s images operate like puzzles of symbols, waiting for the right sequence to unlock their meaning. Everything exists in a state of becoming, shifting and transforming in a performance of dissonant symbols, improvising, mutating, repeating and reinventing, as in a jazz jam session. Her paintings, an urgent manifestation of the subconscious, expose the inherent arbitrariness of the meanings we attach to language, symbols and the physical world around us. Oscillating between interior and exterior realms, between imagination and lived experience, Abercrombie’s reality is both profoundly intimate and strikingly universal.
A major survey—the first in decades—dedicated to Abercrombie’s enigmatic, witch-like oeuvre is now on view at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. The show builds on and reinforces the recent rediscovery of her singular body of work, aligning with a broader surge of interest in the women of Surrealism—an overdue recognition that has driven rising prices and significant institutional attention in recent years. Co-organized with the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine, to which it will travel this summer, this long-awaited exhibition assembles key loans from both museums and private collections and marks the first institutional retrospective of Abercrombie’s work since 1991 and the first to tour across the United States.
While her work might allude to melancholic introspective solitude, Abercrombie was, in reality, at the heart of the scene. The bohemian queen surrounded herself with an eclectic creative circle of musicians, poets, artists and writers, many of whom were Black or queer, who not only inspired her work but also enhanced her life. One room in the exhibition, animated by the sounds of jazz, conjures the atmosphere of her decadent four-story Victorian brownstone in Chicago’s Hyde Park—a home she transformed into a vibrant salon modeled after Gertrude Stein’s but infused with the lively rhythms of her pioneering jazz friends. Stein was a figure Abercrombie deeply admired, a powerful woman who defied the social norms of her time. “Miss Stein was the biggest influence on my painting,” she once said, recalling the legendary art patron’s advice to avoid sloppiness. “She told me I must draw neatly and draw well.”
Gertrude Abercrombie was funny, curator Sarah Humphreville notes in the exhibition catalogue. She deliberately cultivated her eccentricity, adding a touch of oddness to the mundane, dressing flamboyantly to heighten her unconventional beauty and playing up the mystery of her witch-like persona to shape the legend around herself. In an interview with Studs Terkel, reprinted in the catalogue, Abercrombie recalled a moment when a group of children called her a witch as she returned from the store. “Yes, I am, but do you know there are good witches and there are bad witches?” she replied, sending them giggling back to their games.
Abercrombie’s sharp humor and wry sensibility emerge in the strange yet meticulously composed juxtapositions in her paintings—what she described as “simple things which are a little strange.” She delighted in making things “a little odd” but also “a little spooky” or “a little off-beat,” pushing her imagery just beyond the realm of direct reality. Her canvases exist in a liminal space between perception and psychological elaboration, balancing humor with unease. This interplay allowed her to probe “reality as commonly accepted and understood,” as Humphreville observes in her essay for the catalogue, revealing how Abercrombie’s work resists the ordinary at every turn.
With an intense sense of internal inquiry that questions the socially accepted order of reality, Abercrombie’s canvases expose an underlying turmoil—an awkward inquietude and uneasiness that simmered beneath her eccentric mask as she struggled to fit into societal expectations. Perhaps this is why so many of her interiors feel claustrophobic and hostile, like cages she longed to escape but remained bound to—at least until the death of her second husband. Abercrombie lived an unorthodox life, divorcing twice and never quite fitting into the roles of wife or mother. Instead, she reigned as the queen of her own chosen family, surrounded by queer people, artists and musicians who filled her world with creative energy. Occasionally, the same mysterious witch who appeared in her paintings emerged in her life—an enigmatic character she performed to mask an underlying dissatisfaction and an inescapable sense of “otherness.”
From this world of improvisation, Abercrombie coined the term “Bop Art” to describe her work—a fusion of pop sensibilities and the bebop rhythms she adored. Her paintings carry a consistent symbolic lexicon, unfolding in a rhythmic interplay of controlled repetition and intuitive improvisation, mirroring the structure of jazz compositions and the piano melodies she sometimes played alongside her circle. The exhibition dedicates an entire gallery to her deep love of music. “Believe me… I still prefer music to painting,” she once confessed. A large painting of a gramophone—one of the few close-ups in her oeuvre—dominates one canvas. Though static, it pulses with almost audible energy, vibrating with the same notes and lively beats that dictated the rhythm of her painterly compositions. Note after note, symbol after symbol, Abercrombie’s paintings accumulate into sequences—improvised yet deliberate, like the collision of disparate objects in a jazz riff, all in pursuit of some fleeting harmony amid the apparent chaos of sensation.
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The result is a “topsy-turvy aesthetic,” a methodical dissection of reality in which she isolates elements with surgical precision before reassembling them on a seemingly realistic stage where time and space lose their fixed rules. In these scenes, logic is suspended, allowing her to impose her own internal order. Like lucid dreams transferred onto canvas, Gertrude Abercrombie’s oeuvre reflects her ceaseless attempt to construct a parallel world. Her trompe l’oeil mise en abyme teases at the possibility of multiple realities within a single frame, conjuring a world both real and far more enigmatic—one where she could exercise the full freedom of her imagination, even while confined to her home and neighborhood. Her compositions sometimes introduce exotic elements—giraffes, lions, African trees—sudden, unexplainable leaps into other places that painting alone allowed her to reach, despite the fact that she didn’t travel much.
Still, Abercrombie’s reclusion within a more limited local setting never hindered her from achieving critical and market success. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, she exhibited regularly in Chicago and across the country, reaching a peak between 1952 and 1953 when she staged an astonishing nine shows in a single year. Yet, for Abercrombie, something always seemed to be missing. The vastness of her inner world was never quite satisfied by external reality, leaving her restless and unfulfilled. At times, her work took on a subtle yet undeniable political undertone, as seen in her enigmatic “Demolition Door” series, which she began around 1955. These paintings present lines of tightly packed doors, blocking the horizon like an impenetrable barrier. While the scenes appear rigidly structured, Abercrombie occasionally disrupts their formal order, breaking the steady horizontal alignment just enough to suggest an opening—a possibility of something beyond.
The series was inspired by the demolition of homes in Hyde Park, where entire blocks were cleared for urban renewal. Many of these homes had belonged to Black families, exposing the racial implications of the redevelopment effort. Abercrombie, whose progressive ideals were at odds with the injustices unfolding around her, used these paintings to quietly yet forcefully register her disapproval.
As the exhibition progresses, the wall colors gradually darken, mirroring the deepening intensity of Abercrombie’s canvases. A more somber, nocturnal atmosphere takes hold as a creeping sense of melancholy and isolation grows—an echo of the final years of her life. By the 1960s, Abercrombie’s health began to decline, exacerbated by alcohol abuse that led to pancreatitis. Arthritis soon followed, further restricting her movement and ultimately severing her from the vibrant social life she had once thrived in. Confined to her own domestic prison, she found herself unable to access even the one constant escape she had always relied on—her painting. For an artist whose work had long been a tool for confronting her rich yet tumultuous inner world, this was an especially cruel fate.
Carnegie Museum of Art’s extensive exhibition not only unravels the “whole mystery” of Abercrombie’s paintings and inner universe but also offers a rare window into the forces that shaped her restless vision. It invites us to consider how reality itself is never fixed but fluid, formed through the shifting interplay of external events and the unconscious landscapes we carry within us.
“Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery” is on view at Carnegie Museum of Art through June 1.
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