Known for her starkly-colored and confined landscape scenic paintings, Midwest-American Surrealist painter Gertrude Abercrombie often depicts herself as a solitary, mysterious female figure alongside personally notable symbols/motifs such as owls, cats, horses, doors, trees, shells, the moon, and Victorian period-style furniture and garb. The painting Stage Fright (Self Portrait) (1952) is a prime example of the familiar themes and images in Abercrombie’s work.
Gertrude Abercrombie was the only child born to Tom and Lula Janes (Jane) Abercrombie in Austin, Texas, on February 17, 1909. When Abercrombie was four years old, the family moved to Berlin, Germany where Jane sang as the prima donna in an opera company and Tom worked for the Red Cross. Abercrombie learned to speak German and acted as a translator for her parents until the family moved to Aledo, Illinois, Midwest-America, in response to World War I. When she was still a child, her mother “developed a life-threatening goiter which damaged her voice and ultimately ended her career as an opera singer”. Eventually, Tom found work as a salesman and the family settled in Hyde Park, Chicago “where Abercrombie would spend the rest of her life”. Abercrombie was encouraged to pursue writing, but chose instead to “attend classes in figure drawing and commercial techniques at the Chicago Art Institute and the American Academy of Art”. However, she maintained throughout her career that she was “largely self-taught as an artist,” indicated a sense of pride in her apparent lack of art school training. She once said, “I don’t think I’m a very good painter, but I do think I’m a good artist. When you’re a good painter, you know how to put the paint on just where you want it. Sometimes I fail miserably, but I can think up the idea”. Overall, Abercrombie was a dilettante with her own set of skills and talents:

Abercrombie’s childhood experiences left her with a love of languages (her degree from University of Illinois in 1925 was in Romance Languages) and wordplay (she loved puns, anagrams, crossword puzzles, and games of all sorts), music (she was an accomplished musician who had perfect pitch, although she favored jazz over the classical music that dominated her childhood), and a deep connection with middle America.

Abercrombie began to gain recognition for her work in the early 1930s, her first public exhibit being at the Increase Robinson's Studio Gallery in 1932. By 1934, she was hired by “the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal relief program for struggling artists” and was considered well-established in Chicago. The income from this job allowed her to move out of her parents home and gave her confidence in her artistic abilities. By 1940, she married lawyer Robert Livingston and moved to the house she would remain living in until her death at Dorchester Avenue. The house became the site of many a party and the subject of many paintings. Abercrombie chose “Victorian-era furniture upholstered in beige and purple fabric and painted the walls dark gray.” She gave birth to her only child, Dinah, in 1942 and divorced and remarried Frank Sandiford in 1948 whom she would support until his death. It was during this time that she gained a reputation for being the “Queen of Chicago”  or “the other Gertrude” (that is, Gertrude Stein) and creating a circle of Bohemian friends--most notably, jazz artists such as Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Sarah Vaughan (among other life-long friends, were Thorton Wilder and Karl Priebe). In fact, Dizzy Gillespie described Abercrombie as the first Bop artist: "Bop in the sense that she has taken the essence of our music and transported it to another art form’”. Overall, Abercrombie sought out a sense of belonging in the jazz and arts community, and managed to mostly maintain a lively and warm persona when in public, among friends.

However, Abercrombie’s work indicates that her life was one overwhelmed with the marred image she had of herself and her negotiations with that image. Growing up, her parents were “conservative, frugal, and very proper” and demanded Abercrombie conform to their restrained way of life which undoubtedly affected Abercrombie’s confidence in herself and amplified feelings of loneliness.  Reportedly, she felt largely “unloved, first and foremost by her excessively reserved and undemonstrative mother.” Furthermore, 

Abercrombie rejected her mother’s musical tastes, actually refusing to listen to the operatic music so important in her mother’s life...Abercrombie was also frugal to a fault, a quality she found unpleasant in her parents but attributed to her Scotch heritage. She always felt materially poor...Later in life she began to hoard things, both as a way of enriching herself internally and externally and, paradoxically, as a way of hiding things.

Perhaps the most saddening pieces of knowledge people had of Abercrombie was that she found herself to be unattractive, a belief that likely stemmed from her mother’s treatment of her from a young age and amplified feelings of otherness--“critic and dealer Katharine Kuh referred to Abercrombie’s perception of herself as ugly on several occasions; both Dinah Livingston and Wendell Wilcox emphasized the importance of this feeling, Wilcox suggesting that a true understanding of Abercrombie revolved around the issue of her self-perceived ‘homeliness’”. Elmhurst Art Museum Exhibitions Coordinator Lal Bahcecioglu suggests, “If these desolate pictures are indeed an accurate portrayal of what was inside her, perhaps the ugliness she was so convinced of in herself went more than skin deep”. In addition, Bahcecioglu points out that while the paintings may be considered autobiographical, Abercrombie did not give explicit explanations of the symbols and meaning in her work which leaves generous room for interpretation. 

According to Susan Weininger’s essay, in an interview with Studs Terkel shortly before the opening of a retrospective exhibition of her work at the Hyde Park Art Center in February 1977, she said: “It’s always myself that I paint, but not actually, because I don’t look that good or cute...everything is autobiographical in a sense, but kind of dreamy’”. Abercrombie found herself in the personas of witch and queen--both are stereotypically mysterious and powerful female roles, shrouded in an air of glamor. 

In her interview with Terkel in 1977, Abercrombie said, ‘I am a witch, oh, that’s true. I have been called a witch many times.’ The witch role was an assumed role like others in her life. For example, knowing the impact her appearance would make, Abercrombie, according to her daughter’s recollections, ‘would come to school in her gray, pointed velvet hat and all the kids would laugh and say ‘Your mother is a witch.’' She enjoyed the power this artifice gave her over others who would fear or recoil from her. It was also a way of attracting attention."

One can imagine that Abercrombie’s childhood struggles with poverty and the lack of belonging she felt in her family led her to the dreamy images of women who must yield the burden of power alone and pose a potential threat to the balance of social order.  Unfortunately, “she was also well known for her reclusiveness, alcoholism, sarcasm, and stinginess. Her art is intimately connected with and grows out of these contradictions”. It would seem that by painting her own image, Abercrombie was able to best control how she would be seen then, and remembered after death.
As an only child, it is possible that some of her narcissistic tendencies were more a cry for attention and understanding than they were a legitimate mental failing (although she did suffer greatly from alcoholism and depression among other ailments). Evidently, Abercrombie’s “work has a carefully controlled palette and an airless, austere quality that contrasts with the more chaotic conditions of her life”. It must be noted that the landscapes of her painting vary little and the color palette is not only dark and limited, but can be traced to the interior decor in her own home from which she painted. Additionally, Abercrombie drew inspiration from her own dreams, and even claimed to have prophetic dreams. Abercrombie once remarked, “Surrealism is meant for me because I am a pretty realistic person but don’t like all I see. So I dream that it is changed. Then I change it to the way I want it”. In this sense, Abercrombie painted almost as if she were a witch using magic--altering reality to her perspective, offering something “a little strange”. In 1951, a year prior to her painting Untitled (Ballet for Owl), she said “my work comes directly from my inner consciousness and it must come easily. It is a process of selection and reduction”. In other words, Abercrombie painted to both emotionally control and express. 

The painting Stage Fright (Self Portrait) depicts a solitary, pale woman with slicked back, medium-length, light-colored hair, dressed in a long sleeved purple shirt and long black skirt, one leg exposed. The color palette is neutral dark apart from the rich purple and lush green muted jewel-tones. The woman stands strongly, her legs wide apart, and holds a long stick or magic wand, outstretching her arms toward an owl which is perched on a tree stump, as if she is performing a modern movement piece or magic show. This woman appears to be more witch than queen. The woman and tree rest on dark green grass (arguably, remininist of thick carpet) and a sliver of a yellow crescent moon against a dark grey sky hangs between them. The two-toned contrast between the grey sky and green floor create an overwhelmingly confined room-like effect, as if Abercrombie is trapped inside a nearly-empty, in-between space, unable to truly connect with the outside world. Additionally, a single cloud hangs above the woman as if it is attached to her, potentially alluding to her experiences with mental illness as some describe the feeling of depression as a cloud hanging above them.

The barren tree stump with a singular branch may have been inspired by images of chopped trees in Hyde Park, Chicago due to the demolition and urban revival that occurred during the 1950s, or indicate Abercrombie’s fragmentation of identity and/or inability to grow past a certain point which affected her relationships as a wife, mother and friend. While owls have been known to be regal symbols of intelligence, wisdom and silent endurance, “the Native American owl meaning is a unique combination of wisdom and death,” the belief being that an owl accompanies the dead in the transition to the afterlife. Regardless of whether or not Abercrombie viewed owls in the Native American sense, the recurring symbolism does suggest that she viewed owls (as well as cats), as intelligent and worthy companions. Despite being married, raising a daughter and surrounding herself with musician and artist friends, she still experienced severe feelings of loneliness and like many women during the 1950s, turned to alcohol to self-medicate. “Later in life her loneliness and disappointment with her friends was expressed numerous times. For example, she wrote to Karl Priebe in 1976 when both were ill: ‘I wish I had a brother such as yours. I have batches of friends but no-one to watch over me … in my solitude.’ Her art was an arena where these fears were confronted and momentarily mastered”. At the time this was painted, Abercrombie was considered to be on the uptrend of her career, but the resounding theme of loneliness and her desire to paint herself in dream-like spaces suggests the need she felt to escape reality. Tragically, Abercrombie’s internal war was only exacerbated by her alcoholism which led to conditions such as pancreatitis and severe arthritis and resulted in her death on July 3, 1977. 

Personally, I was drawn to Abercrombie’s work because it was made up of themes, symbols, colors and compositions that I would also choose to paint. I relate to Abercrombie’s reported feelings of ugliness, loneliness, guilt and drug usage, and find comfort in her work because in these landscape images, I also see myself. This may be ironic considering she painted first and foremost for herself, but I’ve found I most often relate to the work of artists who worked firstly from a place of personal fulfillment and expression rather than commercially. In reading about Abercrombie’s life experiences, I was reminded of the written works and life of another 1950s female artist, Sylvia Plath. I imagine that like me, Abercrombie felt like she was meant for a life much grander than the one she was dealt and that by creating physical paintings of herself and her home (rather than photography), she engaged in documenting her life in a more traditionalist way, but pushed the boundaries of reality into magical realms for the sake of personal expression.

Essentially, she documented her life before death as if she anticipated, or rather hoped, she would be remembered and missed--I find that fascinating and also relatable in its own way. Just like I imagine Abercrombie felt, I desperately want to belong and be loved and valued, and I see how she felt trapped and longed for a more magical world just as I do. I wonder if she would be disappointed in her legacy because I feel she has left an impact on me, but I had to discover her first and I think she would have wished to be more widely known and celebrated. Today, Abercrombie’s paintings can be found in United States museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Illinois State Museum (Springfield), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington DC).