Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World is a Mystery

Gertrude Abercrombie (American, 1909 – 1977) produced hundreds of paintings imbued with autobiography that revealed her emotional truth and declared it as real. A critical figure in the mid-20th-century Chicago art and jazz scenes, Abercrombie made art to give her internal life visual form. She put herself into her painted world — in self-portraits, landscapes, interior scenes, and still lifes — through the use of personal symbols and enigmatic female figures. She probed her consciousness, mined her memories, drew on her dreams, and found the peculiar in everyday life, painting, as she said, “simple things that are a little strange.”

Abercrombie lived in defiance of her era’s social norms. By blending layers of reality, her paintings similarly question existence as commonly understood and posit alternate dimensions. Though she had a singular vision, her reliance on her inner consciousness and use of a fantastical style connected her to broader developments in American modernism.

This retrospective exhibition — the first nationally touring presentation of Abercrombie’s art — celebrates an artist who has been historically marginalized due to who she was and how she lived and worked. She created a universe that broadens our understanding of American art and identity. Abercrombie observed, “The whole world is a mystery,” a statement that asserts expansive possibilities for liberation and self-discovery through art.