August 9 to September 16, 2018
188 East 2nd Street, between avenues A and B
New York City, karmakarma.org

Gertrude Abercrombie (Karma Books, New York, 2018). Essays by Robert Storr, Susan Weininger, Robert Cozzolino and Dinah Livingston, and an interview by Studs Terkel

When I was little and couldn’t sleep, my mother would tell me to close my eyes and imagine meeting her in Dreamland. Over the years this made up place achieved a fully outlined map: Lemonade Lake was my preferred meeting place with Mom. The pictorial world of Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977) feels, to me, like a warped version of my own Dreamland. Her dark palette, cloudy skies, mysterious shadows, and (my personal favorite) ladders leading to the moon are mystical and, indeed, dreamy, though with the exhilarating potential to turn more sinister. On view in New York for the first time in more than 60 years, Karma Gallery’s selection of 70 portraits, still lifes, and landscapes celebrates the work of the woman who famously, and with some justification, dubbed herself the “Queen of Chicago.”

The daughter of opera singers, Abercrombie lived most of her life in Chicago’s bohemian quarter, Hyde Park, where she became a central figure in the social scene. A  jazz lover and herself a very capable musician, she was close friends with Dizzy Gillespie: There is a touching photograph of the two hugging reproduced in Karma’s gorgeous 400-plus page publication accompanying the exhibition. Her large South Side home was always brimful of creative luminaries, and in dubbing herself the “other Gertrude” she saw herself as Chicago’s Gertrude Stein. Within such a dazzling social circle, it is no wonder that Abercrombie’s interior life – her inspiration – would be as riveting. Thinking of herself as rather witchy (even labeling herself a “good witch” to a group of interested children, as recounted to Studs Terkel in the interview from 1977 published in the book), Abercrombie had a mystical way about her, which comes across  in her paintings. Recurring motifs include black cats, haunted-looking women (often herself), shells, moons, and doors. While painted with care, her work always seems a bit misty, ready to be the setting of a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, or voiced-over with “It was a dark and stormy night…”

The show moves chronologically and clockwise through Karma’s two luminous and spacious rooms, opening with the tiny Untitled (Slaughterhouse at Aledo) (1934), and closing with a signature example of her door series, The Door and the Rock (1971). Abercrombie’s subject matter remains consistent throughout her oeuvre, but the variation of composition and her impeccable ability to create an immersive mood even from small objects (paintings here range from one inch square to three feet on the longest side) nonetheless create a dynamic exhibition. With its down-the-rabbit-hole effect, it is very easy to lose track of time in this exhibition.

Ever the jazz aficionado, Abercrombie thought of herself as a “Bop” painter. This style is evident in her 1945 painting Untitled (Blue Screen, Black Cat, Print of Same). Sedate in her typical blue-grey palette, the painting exudes improvisational whimsy. As the title implies, the painting is of a room with a cat half behind a blue screen, and a picture on the wall of the same room – the blue screen, green floor, and little black cat, but sneakily without anything on its miniaturized wall. This rhythmic variation feels like a solo spot: adding distinctive flare to a still-recognizable standard.

Abercrombie once said that she didn’t think of herself as a good painter, but as a good artist. I believe that her artistry came from her storytelling ability. Though she did have a rather naїve painterly style, this forefronted the composite image rather than drawing attention to the intricacies of a delicate technique. Her paintings adopt the language of the music she loved: carefully constructed compositions like twisting and folding melodies; colors like the key signature that sets the tone; textures like a little vibrato at the end of a phrase. Individually the parts don’t make a lot of sense, but together the piece works.

Reverie (1947) exemplified this unique storytelling, and my experience with this painting characterized the show for me. While it was easy to pick out the Abercrombie stamp, here her motif of the bare tree, the more I looked, the more mysterious the piece became. This is odd, as one would think that the more time you spend with an object the more you can grasp it. But I was excited to find so many works in this show that instead seemed to change the more I stared at them. In Reverie, I noticed how the woman’s lounging pose mimicked the languor of the blackened tree branches, the way they both pointed to the strange brick structure in the distance. With no doors, no windows, what is it? I saw the water in the background, the patch of ground illuminated by a pink-tinged moon. I was riveted by a white shape on the ground: a handkerchief? A sheet of paper? The enigmatic scene is an intellectual challenge while remaining captivating in its surreal quality. I could imagine one of Abercrombie’s owls outside the scope of the frame hooting softly, or a line of melody from Miles Davis drifting in.

In an illuminating essay, Susan Weininger quotes Abercrombie on dreams and Surrealism: “Surrealism is meant for me because I am a pretty realistic person but I don’t like all I see. So I dream that it is changed… Only mystery and fantasy have been added. All the foolishness has been taken out.” Although the imagery and intentional anachronism in Abercrombie conjures a plethora of associations with such Surrealists as Max Ernst, René Magritte, or early work by Giorgio de Chirico, one is as likely to think of fellow women artists as these canonical males. Besides such obvious candidates as Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning, Honoré Sharrer, another Surrealist, came to mind: Her motifs of birds and use of jewel tones invert Abercrombie’s somber style. As does the contemporary video work, BRIGIT (2016), by Turner Prize nominee Charlotte Prodger, in conjunction with Abercrombie’s radiantly blue depiction of a veiled St. Brigit from 1963.

Abercrombie’s witchery conjures such sisterhood, feeding this viewer’s appetite for narrative imagery from powerful ladies (full disclosure, I’m a student at Smith College.) I wonder, also,   how the context of #MeToo is going to impact the rediscovery of the Queen of Chicago. Indeed the show did feel particularly prescient, and I wondered what this powerful woman would think about the political timing of her renaissance.

The final piece of the show wrapped everything up nicely – by which I mean it left many lingering questions. The placement of The Door and the Rock (1971) has a symbolism worthy of  Abercrombie herself. This modestly sized painting – not even a foot square – of a cracked rock sitting in turquoise water, near a red-orange door resting on the water, or perhaps connected to a wall that blends in to the charcoal sky, accompanies the viewer upon exiting the gallery, leaving me to wonder: Does the door in the painting lead to the watery world pictured, or is it a portal to some other fantastic psychological dreamland?

The post The Queen of Chicago: Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma appeared first on artcritical.

My tastes are catholic rebellious,

can alchemise the world into another strangeness

more than clocks

are riddled into or can dream on

sensibilities of the uncanny.

I am

another animal drawn away by magic

from tremors in the night into our

intellectual powers not sexual but

tribal, ancient, plumbago, ivy,

sacred as hyenas

of the fertile night or horses rocking

into rebirth beyond the looking glass

reflects reality more than the real;

arcane, hermetic can be the everyday

of cooking, living, knitting themselves

into myths unravelling like tales of fairies

seen by childish eyes of great age that

close themselves

to the imaged world

that made me blind

to busybodies,

took my precious loneliness from me

to see and see and lead me here

along the needle in my heart

with its clear thread of old blood

and danger never lost

to be

only

myself.

About David Pollard
Born under the bed in 1942, Pollard has been a furniture salesman, accountant, TEFL teacher and university lecturer. He got his three degrees at the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Poetry of Keats: Language and Experience which was his doctoral thesis, The KWIC Concordance to the Harvard Edition of Keats’ Letters, a novel Nietzsche’s Footfalls, and two volumes of poetry, patricides and Risk of Skin. bedbound is forthcoming. He has published in learned journals and poetry magazines.

Self-Portraits
Pollard writes: Midwinter 2007 I went to the Tintoretto exhibition at the Prado. Hugely impressive with room after room of towering examples of Tintoretto’s spectacular genius. Exhausted both physically and emotionally, I made for the exit where, just to the right of the doors was a modest oil on canvas of the artist at the age of 70. Merely 25 by 20 inches, it stopped me in my tracks. The artist’s face looks out at you bathed in gloom, bearded, resigned, summing up a lifetime of protean exhibitionism with a quiet, resigned gaze which is unforgettable and quite over-shadowed the rest.

The following Christmas my wife gave me the Taschen ‘500 Self-Portraits’. Many of these beautifully reproduced works are quite stunning and seemed to me to sum up the lives of the artists; quartets rather than symphonies; David in prison, Bosch atop an egg-tree in hell, da Vinci surrounded by beard in red chalk, Brother Rufillus cowering under the letter his painting. From that point and little by little I began to produce poems to go with these works until I ended up with 72. There may be more. They stretch from Bak at 1500 BCE to Wallinger today. They are mostly short lyrical examinations of the artists and modernist in tone. I attach six to give an idea of the whole.

The post “along the needle of my heart”: Leonora Carrington, 1917-2011 appeared first on artcritical.