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 stated 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 checklist? Because it seems, different strange artists.
A brand new present on the Milwaukee Artwork Museum, Gertrude and Buddies: 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 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 yr. 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 Buddies is meant as a type of companion to the survey present.
“I hope that by means of a ripple impact folks may also gravitate in the direction of the individuals who had been [Abercrombie’s] associates throughout her lifetime, and really a lot had the identical type of inventive intent,” says the exhibition’s curator, Thomas Busciglio-Ritter. “Exploring the world in a type of unusual, eerie, fantastical approach, disturbing their viewers. They had been all only a bunch of playful folks, who had been additionally occupied with 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 had 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, particularly, had been shut and wrote letters to one another nearly day by 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 canines, she would transfer her stuffed canine (a part of her distinctive décor) outdoors till he left.
A portrait painted by Wilde illustrates the group’s particular camaraderie. In it, Priebe stands to the far left alongside Abercrombie along with her arm round Huppler’s shoulder (the 2 chuckle as if sharing a joke, amongst in any other case deadpan expressions). To the suitable of them are Glasier, Fein, a nude described merely as “a buddy”, the artist (and intelligence officer) Arnold Dadian, and at last 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 demise her belief determined to present it to the museum. “There’s a good looking letter wherein she says she doesn’t wish to cling that work,” Busciglio-Ritter. says “She desires to maintain it on her lap and reminisce in regards to the good occasions that they had collectively.”
• Gertrude and Buddies: The Wisconsin Magic Realists, Milwaukee Artwork Museum, till July 2026
