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?

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Long assumed to be already dead, often confused with someone else, Dorothea Tanning managed to maintain the mystique of the true artist, muse even, whilst all her contemporaries fell victim to the obligatory museum retrospective and illustrated biography.

Yes, she was still alive, and all of 101, and no, she was neither Leonora nor Dorothea Carrington, but what Tanning maintained above all else was the grand patrician aura of the lover of arts, connoisseur and patron, the ‘amateur’ in the French and best sense of the word, for whom literature, music, theatre, civilised conversation were as important as her own work.

What made this the more refreshing was that unlike certain self-promoters and media darlings, unlike those who hustle to maintain their supposèd importance, Tanning had actually produced a handful of major, significant and influential art works.

Whenever I went past that rather noble corner of Fifth Avenue where she resided I thought with a discrete, private pleasure, “Ah, the last of the secret society of Surrealists is still hidden here, being herself, even in our own ghastly era” and would tip the metaphoric hat up at her curtains, chintz even I recall.

Thanks to that unusual name, and no Surrealist should be called ‘Smith’, every passing sunbed-emporium blaring TANNING would make me think of her, I hardly knew her, triggering a brief flow of pleasant associations, bus-musings, until the next shop should catch my eye.

She loved poetry – she wrote it and supported it, financially and more importantly morally, and actually actively read the stuff. She loved flowers and was expert upon them. She was witty, sharp, smart, had known ‘everyone’ and still knew a vast range of intriguing, important people. And I really liked her apartment.  Everyone loved to talk about her in terms that recall those Japanese ‘Living National Treasures’, whether America’s greatest contemporary composer, Robert Ashley, to whom she was somehow related, or the Filipacchi family who rightly treated her with utmost reverence.

The first time I went to interview her, after more than an hour of highly enjoyable dirt dishing she paused dramatically, “And now I think it’s time….” So I scrambled to my feet agreeing I certainly should be on my way, I could not exhaust her any further, after all she was already over ninety, “No, no… it’s time for the champagne!”

Two bottles and as many hours later I emerged onto the sparkling mica of the midsummer pavement, “drunk and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue” filled with a bonhomie, an old-fashioned wellbeing worthy of Sedona, Arizona in 1947 or Paris in the early fifties.

She did not like being labeled a ‘woman’ artist and she did not like being branded a ‘Surrealist’ and she would have surely hated the boom in exhibitions, books, Phd dissertations and catalogues devoted to the theme of ‘Female Surrealists’, one of which, inevitably, is currently duitfully trundling round the institutions.*

Indeed Tanning had lasted long enough to already fall prey to a first flurry of such academic researchers coming round to prove their already-fixed assumptions, and had given them suitably short shrift, exploding their neat categories: “I am not even a woman, let alone a Surrealist!”

I had read her book Birthday (proud she signed it for me) which was incredibly good, an exceptional piece of writing quite aside from all art-historical interest, a book I remain surprised is not better known nor regarded as a ‘Modern Classic’ or whatever they call them nowadays. In fact, if she had done nothing else the creation of Birthday would have been achievement enough.

I also got her to sign a collection of poems that she had chosen and paired with her own paintings, many by her many writer friends, which made clear the literary affinities, the skein of poetic associations, within her own work, ‘Surrealism’ having of course been first and foremost a literary rather than visual movement.

To tell the truth I was never really interested in Max Ernst anyway, his looks, though obviously impressive, were too Aryan for my taste, and thus luckily I had no temptation to dwell on him.

Likewise Leonora Carrington, also Ernst’s lover and hence the occasional confusion, never struck me as particularly engaging. For she even shares her name with another woman artist, that Dora of Bloomsbury-fame (who even had a feature film, the eponymous Carrington all about her) and the first duty of any artist is to have a unique name that not one other artist shares. Dorothea Carrington’s work also seemed a bit kitschy and derivative, an impression confirmed by a recent exhibition at Pallant House, Chichester, where such sketchy whimsy failed to awe.

By contrast Tanning’s work never seemed overtly indebted to Ernst, or any other artist, and her most famous painting Birthday of 1942 is a key Surrealist image, resonant, disturbing, long-lasting, and closely-matched by Eine kleine nachtmusik of the next year.

Anyone who knows about poetry knows that one only has to write one good poem, in terms of posterity that’s all anyone is likely to achieve, more than most of us will manage. Likewise one really great, really memorable painting is sufficient to go down in the annals of art-history, and with Birthday Tanning had won her immortality already. And in terms of her own poetry I would suggest that just one really good title is something, and no title was more appropriate than her perfect invention of ‘Sequestrienne’.

But that’s not all! For even if her later paintings are perhaps not quite one’s tasse, there was to be yet one more major breakthrough in an entirely different medium, namely the soft-fabric sculptures she started in 1969. These not only prefigure the work of Louise Bourgeois, who certainly saw them, but also that of Sarah Lucas, who had not seen them but was later astonished by their similarities. These are truly weird, utterly uncanny objects, especially when assembled in tableaux groupings, such as the installation Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (1970–73) at the Pompidou. And they broke completely new ground in their compound of corporeal presence and ‘women’s-work’, all that stitching, synthetic fur and sensual softness. With this clearly female concentration on the body, on sex, fatness, femininity, Tanning single-handedly kick-started a whole style, heralded an entire sub-genre of such work.

I would prefer to remember her as an elegant dilettante, an Grande Dame in eternal exile, a latter-day society hostess, the Dada Mrs Dalloway, one who never had to try too hard, but the truth is that Tanning was also a damn good artist, despite herself.

Just three of her major early 1940s paintings and a room of her early ‘70s sculptures should be enough to convince anyone of her continued importance.

The last time I talked to Tanning was on the phone and after that classic clatter of all nonagenarian telephonic openings, distant kitchen noises and female-helpers and several false starts, she could not have been clearer. “ I’m just too old to talk to anyone….I have to die, it’s been going on for far too long, I’m far too old, I’m sorry but I really have to die. It’s time I died now.”

Tanning has at last achieved her ambition and as she put it in that perfectly entitled poem for herself, Secret: “Why hear congratulations for doing nothing but live?”

* In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, January 29 to May 6, 2012.

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