“I completely fell in love. . . . I was immediately taken with the work.”
That’s how Zack Wirsum, a Chicago-based senior vice president with the auction house Freeman’s/Hindman, described his reaction in 2007 to seeing the work of Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–77), which can be at once compelling and eerie. Women are suspended in the air or positioned within eerie landscapes that suggest secret, dark backstories. Loneliness and isolation linger.
Wirsum, who grew up immersed in the Chicago art world (he’s the son of artist Karl Wirsum, of the legendary Hairy Who group), told me that he immediately called his mother, artist Lori Gunn, to ask why she never told him about Abercrombie. “She just said, ‘It never came up, we never knew her. She died before you were born,’ ” he recalled. “It just was not something that was on the radar.”
Over the years, Hindman has handled a number of Abercrombie works. Wirsum says he was “always on the lookout for them,” though they were long regarded as a “regional thing,” not well known outside of the Windy City.
The works tended to do well at auction, he said, at prices generally ranging from around $1,000 up to $15,000, with a few breaking into the $20,000 range.
But those days are long gone.
Today, the auction record for Abercrombie stands at $864,000, and 60 works have sold for more than $100,000 each, according to the Artnet Price Database. The broader art world has woken up to Abercrombie, and her paintings are hard to come by.
A few key shows helped send Abercrombie’s reputation—and prices—soaring.
One was a 2018 exhibition that curator Dan Nadel organized at the taste-making Karma gallery in New York, where he then worked. (Nadel’s now with the soon-to-open Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, and is about to release a biography of cartoonist R. Crumb.) Her work “sparked something,” Nadel said, adding that it “sticks out in the moment after World War II and before the ’60s. . . that kind of magic moment in the Midwest.” He first encountered her art in 2015, around the time that Karma’s owner, Brendan Dugan, became a fan. The same year as the Karma presentation, which was accompanied by an extensive catalogue, Jenny Gibbs organized a well-received 2018 show at the Elmhurst Art Museum, west of Chicago.
Read on for more details about the intricacies of this intriguing artist’s market.
The Context: Abercrombie was born to opera singers who moved frequently, but she eventually settled in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. She was part of a circle of bohemian artists and jazz musicians, and was friends with famous names like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who stayed at her home.
“She never really had gallery representation,” Wirsum said, though “she did sell things through Marshall Fields department store.” (In the 1960s, the store had a reputable gallery.) Abercrombie also “peddled her wares” at the popular 57th Street Art Fair in Hyde Park, he said. “A lot of her works she was either selling directly to collectors or giving to friends. We’ve had a number of great examples that were either acquired directly from her,” sold or gifted.
“In many ways,” he continued, “she dictated who was exposed to her vision.”
Overall Performance
Auction record: $864,100 for Silo at Aledo (1953) at Bonhams, November 2024.
Top painting price: $864,100 for Silo at Aledo (1953) at Bonhams in November 2024.
Lowest painting price: $1,150 for Black Cat (1957) sold at Sotheby’s Chicago: Sunday, November 8, 1998
Lowest overall price: $875 for Clown and Pedestal (1939) woodcut on wove paper at Heritage Auctions sale on July 27, 2022
Performance in 2024
Lots sold: 24
Bought in: 0
Sell-through rate: 100 percent
Total sales: $3.9 million
Expert View: Kathryn Widing, a postwar and contemporary specialist at Christie’s, said that Karma working with Abercrombie’s work has led to “a reappraisal and a revival in her market.” Prior to its 2018 show, her work had not been given a dedicated solo show since 1991—a full 27 years. A major traveling exhibition just opened at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh that will travel to Colby College in Waterville, Maine, which co-organized it, and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Mentioning the market’s interest, gallery support, and backing from museums, Widing said, “I think of all of these different facets as scaffolding for a building being built.”
Potential Abercrombie collectors should pay careful attention to authenticity and condition, Widing said. Since the artist directly sold and gave away so much work during her lifetime, record-keeping “wasn’t perfect for her,” she said. She advises would-be buyers to consult experts about provenance.
Wirsum described Abercrombie’s 1950s paintings as “a sweet spot where she was doing her best painting. . . . sometimes working as small as a postage stamp or postcard size. It’s interesting, prices for these relatively small works can be many times greater than her larger works.”
Some of the artist’s top prices have come for modestly scaled pieces, like the 8-by-10 inch The Magician (1956), which sold for $470,000, her second-highest price at auction, at Freeman’s/Hindman last September.
The Appraisal: I can’t help but echo the experts: Abercrombie’s work was love at first sight for me, too. Amid the broader resurgence in interest in Surrealism, and for women artists in particular (which was pushed along by Cecilia Alemani’s 2022 Venice Biennale), Abercrombie’s work is riding high. Her dreamlike imagery can be seen as an influence on young artists like Christina Quarles and Loie Hollowell, according to Widing, which means that she could have staying power in both the canon and salesrooms.
For collectors who don’t mind shelling out solid sums for Surreal art that they love, Abercrombie can still look like a relative bargain. (Major pieces by many European names will set you back an easy seven figures.) However, collectors should be careful to do their homework when it comes to important issues like provenance and condition.
