By Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977), “Where or When (Things Past),” 1948, oil on canvas, 21 1/2 x 35 1/2 in., Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin. #arthistory #womanartist #womenartists #Art #painting #oilpainting
The title refers to the song “Where or When,” 1937, by Rodgers & Hart:
“Some things that happen for the first time
Seem to be happening again
And so it seems that we have met before
And laughed before and loved before
But who knows where or when?”
From The Magazine Antiques, March 27, 2018: ‘Abercrombie was the hostess with the mostest on the South Side during the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Second City’s answer to Paris’s Gertrude Stein. The weekly soirées and parties held in her Hyde Park apartment attracted a lively bunch of bohemians, including jazz musicians Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, and Dizzy Gillespie, artists Karl Priebe and Dudley Huppler, and writer James Purdy—“everyone who was important,” as Abercrombie put it.
Her paintings, which recall those of René Magritte (though she claimed not to have seen his work until around mid-century, she admitted he was her “spiritual daddy”), incorporate a rich, surreal personal symbology: tables set with keys, jacks, balls, compotes, and shells; spotlessly clean, claustrophobia-inducing interiors and sidewalks lined with rows of closed doors; lone, moonlit figures traversing barren prairies accompanied by a few tufty, Dr. Seuss–style trees and maybe a cat. Abercrombie’s language of symbols invites deciphering, and the artist invites psychoanalysis. As she said, “It is always myself that I paint.”
She claimed to get most of her inspiration from dreams, and the dreamer certainly had her demons. According to her daughter, Abercrombie was troubled all her life by the cold relationship with her stern parents who were—and this is no joke—itinerant Christian Scientist opera singers (her mother was a prima donna who’d turned fanatical after a scare with a goiter), and her own perceived homeliness. “I’m a witch,” she told Studs Terkel in an interview recorded shortly before her death, “I’ve been called a witch many times,” and the motifs of cats, owls, and nocturnal wanderings seem to underline that self-image.’
