Because the surreal miniature work of the US artist Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-77) have drawn extra artwork world curiosity, so have the wild events she was mentioned to have hosted recurrently at her brownstone in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighbourhood. Events that earned the eccentric mid-Twentieth-century artist nicknames such because the “Jazz Witch” and “Queen of Chicago”. However who was on Abercrombie’s visitor listing? Because it seems, different bizarre artists.
A brand new present on the Milwaukee Artwork Museum, Gertrude and Mates: The Wisconsin Magic Realists, hopes to share a few of Abercrombie’s current limelight with a tightknit group of artists energetic within the cities of Milwaukee, Madison and Chicago, as of the early Nineteen Forties. Works by these artists challenged the dominant American Regionalism aesthetic of the time and depicted the American Midwest in ways in which stretched the bounds of conventional Realism.
A companion present
The group exhibition of 17 works deliberately overlaps with the museum’s flip to indicate the key Abercrombie travelling retrospective that started at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Artwork earlier this 12 months. The survey is now on view on the Colby School Museum of Artwork in Maine (till 11 January 2026), and can journey to the Norton Museum of Artwork in Florida after exhibiting in Milwaukee in March. Gertrude and Mates is meant as a form of companion to the survey present.
“I hope that by means of a ripple impact folks will even gravitate in the direction of the individuals who have been [Abercrombie’s] buddies throughout her lifetime, and really a lot had the identical form of creative intent,” says the exhibition’s curator, Thomas Busciglio-Ritter. “Exploring the world in a form of unusual, eerie, fantastical means, disturbing their viewers. They have been all only a bunch of playful folks, who have been additionally desirous about their place as artists in society at the moment, in very other ways.”
These artists included ringleaders John Wilde and Karl Priebe, in addition to Sylvia Fein, Marshall Glasier and Dudley Huppler. They have been in shut communication and supported one another, regardless of not being a proper motion and by no means having an official group exhibition of their lifetimes. Abercrombie and Priebe, specifically, have been shut and wrote letters to one another virtually every day. And when Abercrombie hosted the Wisconsin crew for a celebration, she had a particular ritual if Priebe was in attendance—as Priebe was afraid of canine, she would transfer her stuffed canine (a part of her distinctive décor) exterior till he left.
A portrait painted by Wilde illustrates the group’s particular camaraderie. In it, Priebe stands to the far left alongside Abercrombie together with her arm round Huppler’s shoulder (the 2 chuckle as if sharing a joke, amongst in any other case deadpan expressions). To the best of them are Glasier, Fein, a nude described merely as “a good friend”, the artist (and intelligence officer) Arnold Dadian, and eventually Wilde, who painted himself in a checkered blazer and vest matching the checkerboard flooring.
The portray as soon as belonged to Abercrombie, and after her dying her belief determined to reward it to the museum. “There’s a good looking letter wherein she says she doesn’t need to cling that work,” Busciglio-Ritter. says “She desires to maintain it on her lap and reminisce in regards to the good instances they’d collectively.”
• Gertrude and Mates: The Wisconsin Magic Realists, Milwaukee Artwork Museum, till July 2026
