Wright Auction

Beckoning appears in my records in relation to its sale at Associated American Artists Gallery in New York in 1950. This is supported by the authentic Associated American Artists label on the verso of the painting. Abercrombie, famously frugal, often recorded the amount she received for her work; in this case it was $30, a bit less than the $50 price on the label, even adjusted for the gallery’s percentage. In 2014 it was sold at Dirk Soulis Auctions in Kansas City, Missouri to the current owner. It was reproduced in Gertrude Abercrombie (New York, Karma Gallery, 2018, p. 276). Its provenance is secure.

The composition, simple yet balanced, along with the air of mystery and the assertion of the artist’s connection to and power over the natural world (the moon, the owl, the carnation) conveys Abercrombie’s distinctive way of imagining a realm that she persuades us is real. 

Like many of Abercrombie’s paintings, Beckoning is a small but fully realized painting with many characteristic elements. A lone woman in a desolate landscape reaches toward a leafless tree with a tiny owl peeking out of it. A large orange moon crossed horizontally by a narrow black cloud fills the sky and a bright blue river snakes through the background. In the period from which Beckoning dates, Abercrombie did several paintings in which owls were situated in or on leafless tress, often with Abercrombie overseeing the scene as a director or teacher (for example, Owl Trainer [School for Owls], 1945, private collection; Owl Trainer #2, 1947, private collection; Owl on the Moon, 1948, University Galleries, College of Fine Arts, Illinois State University). In the former example, two small pink owls sit on the branches of the tree while a third peeks out from an opening in the trunk. In Four Trees and Three Owls (Four Trees) (1950, Hindman Auction 2023) two of the three owls are sitting in the trees, although there is no human figure. A slightly later painting, The Truant (1956, location unknown), includes what seems to be a family of owls on the branch of a tree, the smallest of them nestled into the trunk near the ground (the truant). Beckoning is clearly in the tradition of these works, particularly those in which Abercrombie is cast in the role of trainer. Reaching out to the barely visible owl in the tree, seeking control over both the wisdom and potential malevolence of the bird, Abercrombie asserts her connection to bird and to her own power, as she often does in the guise of a witch or a queen.

The river reappears in a painting from 1951 called Search for Rest (Nile River) (Dijkstra Collection), where it is a longer but less dominant element of a much larger painting that also includes Abercrombie gesturing, in this case, toward her Victorian chaise, presumably the site of the respite alluded to in the title. In Beckoning the river, along with the enormous orange moon, a phenomenon called a harvest moon that reliably occurs late in summer and frequently has spiritual significance ascribed to it, Abercrombie created a magical landscape rich with mystery.

Adding to the enigmatic environment is the tree, which like many of those in Abercrombie’s paintings takes on almost human characteristics. The two outstretched limbs reach up toward the sky as if they were arms, at the same time as they echo the curve of the river. One additional detail, a tiny carnation emerging from the side of the figure’s dress, proclaims that this is Abercrombie’s world. The carnation is her personal flower, in the same way that she considered the moon her private property.

The composition, simple yet balanced, along with the air of mystery and the assertion of the artist’s connection to and power over the natural world (the moon, the owl, the carnation) conveys Abercrombie’s distinctive way of imagining a realm that she persuades us is real.

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.