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This painting of a small owl presiding over a trio of large eggs is one of many images of eggs that begin to appear in the artist’s oeuvre in about 1954. She continued to paint eggs with a variety of accompaniments into the 1960s when her production fell off because of illness. This painting, along with a companion piece, Chicken with Eggs (1961), were in the collection of Chicago National Boulevard Bank where I photographed them in 1983. Bank One purchased Chicago National Boulevard Bank in 1995; Bank One was acquired by J.P. Morgan Chase and Company in 2004. The painting was a gift to the current owner from a friend who purchased the paintings in a thrift shop. At some point, the original Boulevard Bank collection must have been dispersed, the less valuable works going to the thrift shop. It sounds impossible now, as there is a strong market for Abercrombie’s work, but in the 1990s there was very little interest in her painting. There is, however, no question about the authenticity of this painting.

This owl, like so many that she painted, is anthropomorphic, supporting the idea that it is yet another of her alter egos.

Abercrombie began to paint eggs in about 1954, combining them with many other still life objects familiar in her work of the period. In this painting, the large eggs seem to be presided over by a small owl, another recurring image in her work. The owl, like the cats she painted so frequently, is associated with one of Abercrombie’s favorite personas—the witch, in whose guise she appears often in her paintings. The owl appears in too many paintings to name, both interior and exterior scenes, with or without an accompanying figure, but always as a reminder of both the wisdom and menace that it embodies. This owl, like so many that she painted, is anthropomorphic, supporting the idea that it is yet another of her alter egos. Rather than a feathery torso, this owl has a human-like set of legs with simplified, but undeniable, female genitalia. The owl’s distinctive blue eyes match some of those in the artist’s many self-portraits.

The eggs, like the still life elements in most of the artist’s work, are beautifully painted to create a real sense of substance and three-dimensionality, something she worked hard to learn in her art classes at the University of Illinois, where the traditional curriculum demanded the perfection of these skills before proceeding to studying the human or other animate bodies (see some of her student studies in the Illinois State Museum, Springfield). The owl, while similar to her many other owls, is less naturalistic albeit charming.

The composition, like most of her work, is seemingly simple and spare. In addition to the owl and the eggs, there are three typically wispy clouds arranged above the eggs. It presents as a straightforwardly symmetrical composition, but is not only a surface symmetry but a symmetry in three dimensions, anchoring the painting and creating a bit of dynamism within the severe structure. The symmetrical composition is unusual for Abercrombie, but plays a part in the meaning of the work. The owl, Abercrombie’s surrogate, stands precisely in the center of the clouds and eggs, which seem to surround and enclose it, much like the austere rooms she began painting at the beginning of her career. These rooms, enclosures that permit no exit, act as metaphors for Abercrombie’s own feelings of emptiness, loneliness, and insecurity. Here, the owl acts, as Abercrombie often did, as the controlling center of the image, with the power that the artist often sought through her own association with the witch or queen personas that she so often employed. In this case, the owl alter ego becomes the stand-in for the artist, who famously said, “It is always myself that I paint.”

The owl, despite its small stature is both wise and forbidding, and seems to exert control over both the enormous eggs, a source of life, and the heavens above. The painting is infused with the kind of wit and mystery that makes Abercrombie’s work both engaging, powerful, and endlessly meaningful.

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.