In Chicago in the mid-1950’s, Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977) was acknowledged as the “Queen of Bohemian Artists.” She grew up in Hyde Park, home of the University of Chicago, the daughter of itinerant opera singers, but she became a painter, not a musician, though she had real musical chops, as her reputation as an improvisational jazz pianist attested. With her second husband, music critic Frank Sandiford (Dizzy Gillespie played at their wedding), she was an active participant in what might be called Chicago’s South Side art scene. The parties held in their rambling old house were the closest thing to Gertrude Stein’s fabled Parisian salons a generation earlier. One might encounter jazz musicians such as Sonny Rawlins, singers like Sarah Vaughan, surrealist painters like Marshall Glasier, or authors such as James Purdy, who immortalized Abercrombie in his book Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue. She was also the inspiration for jazz pianist Richie Powell’s composition “Gertrude’s Bounce.”
The year she died, 1977, she had a retrospective at the Hyde Park Art Center. I was in Hyde Park at the time, attending grad school at the University of Chicago, but I didn’t see the show. Even if I had heard about it, I might have dismissed it as a show of some retardataire regional painter from the old days. Although she had briefly studied figure painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, Abercrombie’s main training had been received at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, an institution for students seeking careers as commercial artists, and she had worked as an illustrator for Sears in early adulthood. She went on to work for the W.P.A., as so many artists did during the Depression, and she continued to paint in a figurative style the rest of her life. To a budding art critic like myself, Abercrombie would have seemed a living dinosaur.
How times have changed. In the years since Abercrombie’s death, the Modernist paradigm collapsed, and Postmodernist theory brought in a reconsideration of the figurative art that was supposed to have become obsolete with the advent of Abstract Expressionism. A real market for artists once dismissed as “Regionalists” has appeared. In addition, museums and collectors are actively seeking works by women artists who were shamefully neglected in their lifetimes.
Abercrombie is a perfect example of the trend. Two of her paintings had cracked the six-figure level at auction in the past three years, after years in the low to mid-five figure range, but there was a scandal last year when a Michigan man was arrested by the FBI on charges of forging works by several artists, including a work purported to be by Abercrombie which had subsequently sold for almost a hundred thousand dollars at a Midwestern auction. Sotheby’s had a nice little oil, just under 5 by 7 inches in size, coming up at their American sale last week. The painting had impeccable provenance, but given the uncertainty in the Abercrombie field at the moment, Sotheby’s American art specialist Kayla Carlsen chose to make the estimate an extremely conservative $10,000-15,000. She needn’t have worried about the painting’s reaching its reserve: Giraffe blew past its estimates to bring an astounding $365,400.
The Abercrombie was an extreme example, but it was only one of several paintings that exceeded their estimates in the American sales held by Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Bonhams last week. American art did well across the board – Hudson River, American Impressionist, Ash Can, and Modernist works. Coupled with the strength of the Impressionist and Modern sales and the Contemporary sales earlier in the month, it is apparent that the pandemic of 2020, far from killing the art market, only served to heighten a pent-up demand.
If you’re looking for some art to assuage your own pent-up collecting urge, let me know what you’re seeking. And if you haven’t had your collection appraised for insurance or estate planning purposes in some time, you ought to give me a call. Times (and values) have changed.
