‘Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery’ at the Carnegie Museum of Art

Enigmatic 20th-century painter Gertrude Abercrombie is the latest item of interest at the Carnegie Museum of Art. In a small retrospective, viewers are presented with the bizarre and bohemian art and life of Ms. Abercrombie, featuring works ranging from about 1935 to 1965.

Abercrombie’s work across the course of her career is full of surrealist influences, and many of her works feature the usual hallmarks of Surrealism (tiny canvases and floating figures and ladders leading up to the moon and whatnot), but her most striking scenes are far more subtle in their uncanniness. Paintings like “White Cat” or her “Demolition Doors” series sit with you the most afterward. It’s the oddness brought on not by seeing a strange dreamscape, but instead by seeing a room that’s just a bit too empty, and a bit too pale, and where a cat keeps staring at you.

Much of the show’s curation and plaques emphasize Abercrombie’s status as the “queen of the bohemian artists.” Living in mid-century Chicago, she was a big figure in jazz and art circles, cavorting with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Gillespie is quoted on one wall as saying, “Gertrude Abercrombie is the bop artist, bop in the sense that she has taken the essence of our music and transported it into another art form.”

Thinking about the work with this quote in mind adds a very interesting angle to it all. Typically, when thinking about “jazzy” art, most people think more in tune (hah!) with Pollock’s wild Ornette Coleman-esque abstractions, and not of the super-still twilit scenes by Abercrombie and her contemporaries. Abercrombie’s paintings appear uncannily motionless, and yet she described them as “real crazy” and “real real.” Abercrombie’s doors and cats and moons are, perhaps, to jazz what John Cage’s “4:33” is to classical, offering another way to think about each genre’s energies.

“The Whole World Is a Mystery” lives up to its title, as one cannot help but get that infectious feeling afterward that the best surrealist art gives you, where every pot and pan looks strange somehow, and where the sky feels like it should be turning pink and green at any second. It is a fascinating look into the world of a deeply pensive, deeply bizarre, and deeply emotive artist and her wonderfully odd 10-inch-by-12-inch worlds.