Queen of Chicago: American Surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie

A Musical Beginning

Born to touring opera singer parents, Abercrombie grew up around music and quickly developed an adept ear. After studying Romance languages at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, she attended the American Academy of Art College and took a job drawing gloves for a department store. Next, she drew for Sears. She lived at home with her strict Christian Scientist parents and created paintings, which she sold at outdoor art fairs.

In 1935, the Federal Arts Project hired Abercrombie as part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. “That gave me a big start and a boost. God bless Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We all worked hard,” said Abercrombie. “It just saved some of our lives, and it started me on my career.” She moved out of her parents’ home and into the South Side apartment featured in many of her paintings.

Dreamscapes

According to Abercrombie, her compositions came to her in her dreams, and her figures were portraits of herself. She felt a special kinship with the work of René Magritte, whom she called her “spiritual daddy.” “Well, I don’t paint one eighth as well as he did,” she said, “… I don’t think I’m a very good painter, but I do think I’m a good artist.”

When describing the flowing dresses worn by the figures in Abercrombie’s works, biographer Susan Weininger said, “Sometimes I wonder whether it was because it was easier than painting legs.” While Abercrombie did not exhibit exceptional drawing skills, her composition and concepts were truly unique and affecting.

Navigating Family Life

In 1940, Abercrombie married lawyer Robert Livingston, and they had a daughter, Dinah. Her painting Dinah Enters the Landscape is often interpreted as an examination of her unease at becoming a new mother. Abercrombie and Livingston divorced in 1948.

“She didn’t divorce him until she found him another wife,” Weininger said. She goes on to explain how Abercrombie depicted the handoff of Livingston to his next wife in The Chess Match.

Shortly afterward, Abercrombie married Frank Sanford. “He had been a jewel thief, safe robber, imprisoned twice,” wrote Abercrombie’s friend August Becker. Sanford also owned a record shop and knew all of the jazz musicians who came through town. His and Abercrombie’s home was a haven for Black musicians seeking safe spaces after evening shows in the era of segregation. Saturday night parties turned into Sunday jam sessions, where sometimes Abercrombie would jump in on the piano.

Queen of Chicago

Liquor flowed freely, and just as segregationist norms were eschewed, so were traditional attitudes about sexuality. “There was not a hard line drawn between straight and queer identities in Gertrude’s world,” wrote August Becker. He added that both of Abercrombie’s husbands had male lovers.

Abercrombie’s spot in the jazz scene and her home’s location in Hyde Park placed her in the thick of the demographic and cultural changes taking place in Chicago. The Great Migration meant an influx of Black Americans and the resulting racial politics. Hyde Park became one of the country’s first “urban renewal” programs, which meant bulldozing largely Black-populated areas for redevelopment. Doors were pulled off buildings before their demolition, and this became fodder for Abercrombie’s demolition door series.

Gertrude Abercrombie and Frank Sanford acquired an old Rolls-Royce, more of a barely-running prop than a functioning car. They took it to the vacant lot near an outdoor art fair, and propped paintings along the running boards. “My, my, they were so weird I would not have dared to get close, afraid of being thought in some way interested in or attached to any group so queer,” wrote Becker. “And to a young man of 19, trying to pass as straight and adult—threatening.”

Abercrombie started to paint miniatures, too, some small enough to be used as broaches, perhaps because she could produce and sell them quickly. Often, she lived with too much alcohol and not enough money.

She and Sanford divorced in 1964. Her health deteriorated due to alcoholism and arthritis, and she began using a wheelchair. In 1977, shortly before she died, friend and fellow artist Don Baum put together a retrospective of her work at the Hyde Park Art Center. After her death the same year, he became a trustee of her estate.

Legacy

Abercrombie’s work has become more popular after her death, causing The New York Times to write the headline “This Surrealist is Having a Moment 66 Years After Her Death.” Her 2025 show, Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World is a Mystery, was recently at the Carnegie Museum of Art and will travel to the Colby College Museum of Art for viewing from July 12, 2025, through January 11, 2026.

In both her art and in her life, Abercrombie flew in the face of convention. A beacon to Bohemian Chicagoans, she embraced her odd-duck status, sometimes dressing the part in a pointed black hat. She told a story about a group of children watching her walk down the street. One brave child approached her and asked, “Are you really a witch?” She replied, “Yes, I am, but do you know there are good witches and there are bad witches? I’m a good witch.”