Wright Auction

This image of a simple block house and leafless tree in an austere, dark landscape resembles other landscapes done around this still early moment in Abercrombie’s career. It was exhibited in Abercrombie’s one-person show at Associated American Artists Gallery in New York in 1946 (no. 49) and sold from the exhibition to Frederick James for $35. Abercrombie, always frugal and careful about money, noted that she received $23.34 from the sale. The painting was subsequently sold at Treadway Toomey Auctions in 2013 to the present owner. The provenance is secure.

Abercrombie’s capacity to create a whole world in a tiny space is one of her great gifts, something that is apparent in Green House.

Green House is typical of Abercrombie’s unadorned landscapes, in this case featuring the simple block house with what may be a hitching rail for a horse and a white leafless tree in a dark, uninhabited setting. These are elements that Abercrombie employs numerous times, always in unique and original ways. The earliest appearance of the simple cuboid building like the one in Green House is in a painting called The Hill (1938, sold at Richard Gray Gallery, 2022). This is significant in that the house in The Hill is placed in a lush, green landscape characteristic of her early work and reminiscent of the western Illinois countryside associated with the home of her extended family in Aledo. The Aledo landscape reflects the warm feelings elicited by Abercrombie’s memories of being surrounded by her many aunts, uncles, and cousins, which contrasted with her life in Chicago as the only child of very strict parents. By the early 1940s, the verdant and fertile setting had been replaced with the ascetic and sparse terrain that is seen in Green House.

The simple building appears in many paintings, most of them from the mid-1940s, with variations in color, placement, number, and shape of windows and doors ranging from the simple cuboid with a door in The Parachutist (1945, Springfield, Illinois State Museum) to those with more windows or several stories (see Green House with Fence, 1945, Private Collection; Girl Searching (Midnite Stroll), 1945, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Blue Shanty, 1945, Phillips Auction, 2022). Green House, a more complex two-story structure with entry stairs, is one that begins to resemble the row house at 5728 S. Dorchester in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood that Abercrombie moved to in 1944 and where she lived for the rest of her life, also seen in paintings beginning in the mid-1940s. Green House stands in a place between the simple block houses and the more fully developed images that refer to the row house (see Grey House, 1945, location unknown; The Past and the Present, 1945, Chicago, Art Institute).

The block house is significant for a variety of reasons. The artist was adept at geometric shapes, having studied perspective in her traditional art classes at the University of Illinois (see her college studies in the Illinois State Museum collection), while more complex forms were not her forte. At her best, as we see in these examples, she recognized her strengths. An additional reason for including images of these dwellings was personal—and her art was always personal. From an early moment in her career, she developed the theme of a simple room that seems to reflect her own internal life—the room is austere, empty or relatively empty and completely closed. These impenetrable spaces offer no escape, a metaphor for her own feelings of desolation, insecurity, and loneliness—despite her presentation as the life of the party, surrounded by friends who adored her. Other dwellings appear regularly—at the end of this decade she began to paint shells, tents, eggs, and even the three-sided structures in which she struggles with her own inability to free herself (these she titled Self Imprisonment or Self Entrapment). The block houses that offer no access or escape, some without doors at all, are part of the theme that was a major subject for her throughout her career.

The few other elements in the painting, particularly the typical leafless tree with its lively, almost human appearance and the empty hitching rail are arranged in a satisfying and balanced composition, the stable house contrasting with the active tree, its bright white color picking up the color of the window in the lower-left corner of the house. While Abercombie did occasionally paint herself peeking through a window in a house (see Mysterious Stranger, 1953, Hindman Auctions 2023; The Visit (Night Visitor), 1944, Susannin’s Auctions, 2014) that does not seem to be what is happening in this painting. It is more likely the curtains are open to give us a tiny view into the house, a small crack into the closed world of the artist, and a nice compositional touch to contrast with the darker elements of the landscape.

Abercrombie’s capacity to create a whole world in a tiny space is one of her great gifts, something that is apparent in Green House. The darkness broken by the white tree and the tiny glimmer of light in the window offers a bit of hope amid the desolation.

Broadly considered, Chicago Modernism includes works in a range of styles covering all manner of themes from the 1890s through the mid-20th century. From portraiture to landscapes, from still lifes to abstractions, and more, artists who were active in Chicago prior to the turn of the 20th century up through World War II helped to define the emerging city to itself and the world outside. This period featured notable artists producing finely executed and innovative examples of Impressionism, Realism, Abstraction, Regionalism, Surrealism, and Magical Realism. While connected to the major artistic currents in cultural centers like New York City and Paris, Chicago Modernism was able to develop in a relatively organic and original fashion given the Midwest’s geographic isolation and its tendency to be sometimes overlooked.

Following the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which certainly put the city on the map, in a literal and figurative sense, Impressionism, and its variants, began to take hold in Chicago, as it had already on the East Coast. When the modern era dawned, much of the Impressionist artwork done in Chicago contrasted rural and urban life or manifested as formal portraiture. Some of the key figures of this time were Oliver Dennett Grover, Adam Emory Albright, Frederick Fursman, Pauline Palmer, Frank C. Peyraud, Walter Krawiec, Carl Krafft, Karl Albert Buehr, and Alfred Juergens. The early decades of the 20th century also saw increased immigration to the United States, in particular, by Central and Eastern Europeans. In Chicago, some of these recent arrivals, and first-generation residents, sought to preserve their heritage while capturing the urban development around them. Among these were prominent Jewish-American artists like Emil Armin and Todros Geller, who exhibited with Grant Wood at the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as William Schwartz, Herman Menzel, Charles Turzak, and George Josimovich.

In the 1920s and 1930s, as the built environment of Chicago expanded, artists sought to represent this growth in their work. Many of these individuals were also employed by the New Deal-sponsored WPA (Works Progress Administration) Federal Art Project, which aimed to enhance the cultural fabric of America as the Great Depression threatened to fray the social contract. While there was some overlap aesthetically with work created by noted Regionalists like Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, the Chicago WPA artists operated in a variety of modes that ranged from Modernism to Art Deco to Abstraction. Around this time, the exceedingly versatile artist/designer Edgar Miller also began to make his mark on Chicago by blending elements of Arts & Crafts with Modernism in virtually every medium available.

Along with many of the European immigrants in Chicago, additional artists who were employed by the WPA to produce murals, paintings, prints, sculpture, and more included Jean Crawford Adams, Max Kahn, Eve Garrison, Roff Beman, Frances Foy, Harold Haydon, Rowena Fry, John Winters, Burton Freund, Hildreth Meiere, and countless others. The diversifying city was also represented in the WPA by artists of color like Eldzier Cortor, Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Jacob Lawrence, and Julio de Diego. Moreover, formally distinct Abstraction existed within Chicago Modernism by WPA artist Rudolph Weisenborn, as well as his student at the Art Institute of Chicago, Dorothy Stafford, along with the groundbreaking Manierre Dawson, Constructivist artist Paul Kelpe, Richard A. Florsheim, and Daniel Massen, who taught at the School of Design and the Art Institute of Chicago.

“Fantasy art afforded these [Chicago] artists a way of departing from tradition without abandoning many of its values: grounded in figuration and narrative, such art gave expression to highly personal visions in accordance with the aims of Modernism.” — Susan S. Weininger, Chicago Modern, 1893-1945: Pursuit of the New, Terra Museum of American Art, pg. 67

Modernism in Chicago further encompassed both Surrealism and Magical Realism. Given the city’s physical and cultural isolation, these fantasy-based art forms were able to flourish in unconventional, idiosyncratic ways. Gertrude Abercrombie, known as the “Queen of Bohemian Art,” was also a WPA artist, but, rather than presenting Chicago cityscapes or urban scenes, Abercrombie established herself on symbolic terrain. A master of self-portraits, Abercrombie inserted female figures into her beguiling works, but she was also fond of painting herself via owls, cats, horses, and other animals, or through elegantly simple still lifes with charged, everyday elements.

Among Abercrombie’s contemporaries were various highly skilled female artists, such as Julia Thecla, Helen Mann, and Margo Hoff, who each elaborated uniquely imaginative approaches to otherworldly effect. Macena Barton and Fritzi Brod were likewise accomplished fantasists whose work combined aspects of Expressionism and Folk Art. Milwaukee artist Karl Priebe trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and became known for his particular brand of Surrealism, with favorite subjects being portraits of Black figures he encountered teaching at a settlement house in Chicago as well as birds and exotic animals. Priebe was a longtime friend of Abercrombie's and they both were close with Wisconsin artist John Wilde—another proponent of Surrealism. Chicago native Aaron Bohrod faithfully chronicled local landscapes early in his career, before becoming adept at trompe-l’œil still lifes while an artist in residence at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. By contrast, Ivan Albright—son of Impressionist painter Adam Emory Albright—applied painstaking, classical techniques to render Modernism with a macabre vision and moody palette; his dark, high-relief portraits and still lifes provide a somber, yet undeniably compelling, counter to the soft brushstrokes and light-filled canvases of the Impressionists who ushered in Chicago Modernism over a half century before.

Not only did the many incarnations of Chicago Modernism serve to produce a robust aesthetic culture by the mid-20th century, but several of the aforementioned artists proved to be key influences for later generations. Gertrude Abercrombie, Eldzier Cortor, Todros Geller, and others have benefited from posthumous critical reevaluations, in which they have become more highly regarded now than they were during their lifetimes. Thematic and stylistic traces of Modernism may also be observed in the work of some artists associated with subsequent movements, such as the Monster Roster, Hairy Who?, and Chicago Imagists, proving that art history is indeed a continuum.