Wright Auction

This painting belonged originally to Dale Bernard, a close friend of Abercrombie’s whom I interviewed in 1981. He purchased it from the Hyde Park Art Fair in 1970. It was subsequently sold at Treadway Toomey Auctions in 2012 to the present owner. It has a secure provenance and is an authentic work by the artist.

In the early 1950s, Abercrombie became interested in still life painting, often lavishing attention on the objects she chose and creating extremely naturalistic images, encouraged by her friend the artist John Wilde, who urged her to paint more carefully and with more detail. She tried, sometimes successfully, to achieve this goal, never reaching the precision of Wilde’s work. She did write to him in late 1951 that she wished he could see the shells she was painting, so she must have been proud of her achievements in this area. A beautiful, highly detailed painting of shells on a beach by Wilde, dated 1951 (now in the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art) was in her estate, providing her with firsthand inspiration.

Abercrombie painted shells in a variety of settings from elaborate still lifes, in combination with drapery and ribbons (see Shell and Drape, 1952, formerly Maurer Collection, Hindman Auctions 2022), leaves, jacks, and balls (for example, Shell and Leaf, 1958, private collection) to small images with additions such as flags (for example, Snail, 1956, private collection) to tiny images such as this one. She produced the tiny paintings in great numbers in the early 1950s, probably out of economic necessity after her first marriage to Robert Livingston, a lawyer who was a good provider ended. Immediately after her divorce, she married Frank Sandiford, a small-time criminal turned record store salesperson, changing her economic situation. These miniatures, often of single shells, were sometimes made into pins or brooches with frames of the artist’s design fabricated by a jeweler, often sold at local art fairs. These could be produced relatively rapidly and were very popular.

The shell was a significant subject for Abercrombie, who was drawn to interior spaces from an early point in her career, painting the austere interior modeled on her first apartment in the Weinstein Building in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago as an impenetrable, inescapable space, corresponding to her own feelings of entrapment, insecurity, and loneliness. The shell is another kind of room, a simple space from which there is no escape, echoing the constructed spaces she so often painted.

Abercrombie almost certainly had a collection of shells on which she modeled her paintings and there are a number of types that recur regularly. This almost circular, spiraling snail shell like the one in this painting appears frequently until the end of her career (examples abound, in addition to those cited above: Shell and Flag, 1955, August Becker Collection; Shell, c. 1952, Carlberg Collection; Shell, 1954, Hindman Auction, 2023). Sometimes the shell has a little crack on the left hand side as seen in Little Shell; sometimes it is entirely smooth. Little Shell is a dark gray shading to grayish blue, but there are color variations as well.

The combination of beautiful composition and a powerful personal significance that resonates deeply with the viewer is present in this tiny tour de force.

Even in seemingly simple images like Little Shell, Abercrombie modified her compositions so each is unique. One of the ways she distinguished the small paintings of single shells was by varying the backgrounds, colors, and the size relationship between setting and shell. In this variant, the artist adds a small white cloud in the upper left, balanced by the dark shadow cast by the shell in the lower right, demonstrating her care in crafting a balanced composition, even in the most modest of her works. The combination of beautiful composition and a powerful personal significance that resonates deeply with the viewer is present in this tiny tour de force.

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.