Wright Auction

This is a relatively early painting by Abercrombie, identified in my records as Cat and Ball. It was exhibited extensively by the artist before it was sold in 1944. It was shown in group shows at Katharine Kuh Gallery, Chicago in 1940; at Passedoit Gallery, New York in 1942-43; Art Institute, Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1943; and the Art Institute, Milwaukee in 1943. It was purchased (for $25—Abercrombie, notoriously frugal, often recorded the prices her paintings were sold for) in 1944 from her solo exhibition at Marshall Field and Company. At this time, many department stores had commercial galleries and had regular exhibitions where the works were sold. The current owners purchased the painting from Sally Sherman in the early 1980s, who with her husband Boris relocated from Chicago to Los Angeles, where the owners acquired the painting. It is possible that the Shermans were the original buyers from the Marshall Field Galleries. The frame also seems to be the one Abercrombie originally used. The provenance and the evidence in my records support the authenticity of the work.

The painting is characteristic of Abercrombie’s work in many ways. The wooden table partially covered by a cloth, as well as the cat, ball, and picture on the wall of a closed room are seen in many of the artist’s paintings, always arranged in ways that make each work unique and uniquely meaningful. The table is seen often in the artist’s earliest work until about 1940, the date of this painting. The cats and the picture on the wall persist in her work throughout her career. There on the Table (1935, Springfield, Illinois State Museum), which won the Joseph Eisendrath Prize ($100, in the middle of the Depression) at the Chicago and Vicinity Show at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1936, is dominated by the large rectangular wood table partially covered by a green cloth on which there are a variety of objects including a cat and a ball. Head on a Plate (1936, Private Collection) includes the table and green cloth, with a reclining cat and a single jack. Untitled (Still Life) (1940, Springfield, Illinois State Museum) has a white plate and blue vase with a single large sunflower mirroring the yellow of the cloth partially covering the table. Letter from Karl (1940, Chicago, Union League Club Collection), done for the WPA, is the largest and most elaborate of these related works, and includes a picture on the wall and a cloth covering the table in the same turquoise blue as Cat and Ball.

Abercrombie often painted on a very small scale and despite the size of Cat and Ball, Abercrombie has filled it with enough of her emblematic and personally resonant components to give it significance far beyond its measurements. Cats are ever present in Abercrombie’s life and art. She always had several cats in her household and felt an enormous connection with them leading her to say, when pregnant with her daughter Dinah, that she could imagine giving birth to a cat, but not a human. The cat often served as an alter ego. Abercrombie enjoyed games and the ball (with or without the jack) is both part of a game and an appropriate toy for the cat. The compressed and closed space of the room is alleviated by the painting on the back wall, another feature seen in many Abercrombie compositions. In this case, it is a landscape with one leafless tree and a full moon, much like some of those she was making on a larger scale at this time. Reminiscent of the landscape around Aledo, Illinois, home of her extended family, it is lush and green (in contrast to the gloomier landscapes she painted in the mid-1940s and later). While the room is sterile and confined, reflecting her own inescapable loneliness and insecurity, the landscape is fertile and reminiscent of freedom and unconditional love she felt around her extended family in contrast to her position as an only child in a very strict household.

It is remarkable how much Abercrombie is able to pack in to such a small image. The painting bristles with personal allusions that reverberate—the spare, almost empty room with its compressed space (the present) contrasting with the richness of the painted landscape (her idealized past) speak to the viewer.

The composition is deceptively simple. Abercrombie, skilled at creating believable objects and three-dimensional space— subjects she studied in her art classes at the University of Illinois (see some of her class studies now in the collection of the Illinois State Museum, Springfield)—creates a believable recession using the diagonal of the table top and the chair behind the table to establish believable space. The draping of the tablecloth allows her to show her skill in the use of light and shade to energize and create interest in this ordinary setting. She is able to achieve a beautiful sense of roundness in her shading of the ball. In addition, she uses color to unify the painting, which is primarily brown-gray aside from the bright turquoise of the fabric on the table, a hallmark color of the artist, picked up in the landscape on the wall. Furthermore, the moon in the landscape is echoed in the ball on the table. Not accidentally, the color and style of the frame on the painting on the wall resonates with the real frame. She uses these techniques to create a tightly balanced yet dynamic composition both on the surface and in three dimensions.

It is remarkable how much Abercrombie is able to pack in to such a small image. The painting bristles with personal allusions that reverberate—the spare, almost empty room with its compressed space (the present) contrasting with the richness of the painted landscape (her idealized past) speak to the viewer. Her ability to create something believable, yet mysterious, is one of her great gifts to us.

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.