Edited with text by Eric Crosby, Sarah Humphreville. Foreword by Eric Crosby, Jacqueline Terrassa. Text by Katie Anania, Donna Cassidy, John Corbett. Chronology by Cynthia Stucki.

Published by Carnegie Museum of Art and Colby College Museum of Art

ISBN 9781636811550

This book is the definitive scholarly volume on Chicago artist Gertrude Abercrombie, who was a critical figure in the mid-20th-century Chicago art and jazz scenes. Abercrombie was a creative force of singular vision who, from the 1930s until her death in 1977, produced enigmatic paintings full of personal significance. With a deft hand, a concise symbolic vocabulary and a restrained palette, she produced potent images that speak to her mercurial nature and her evolving psychology as an artist. Cats, owls, doors, moons, barren trees, seashells and searching female figures all converge in her mysterious works, which suggest a life of purposeful introspection and emotional struggle. Drawing consistently on her dreams as source material, Abercrombie said, “The whole world is a mystery.”

Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery accompanies the artist’s first retrospective since 1991: an eponymous exhibition which begins at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh before traveling to the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine and the Milwaukee Art Museum.

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