Replaying the fading events of a dinner party, retracing an old commute only to watch roads and houses crumble in the mind’s eye—these internal journeys make us feel as if the ground was pulled from beneath us, or never truly there to begin with. I like to imagine The Past and the Present as an effort to not only linger with a similar disorientation, but to experience it as a creative source. In this spirit, I will linger with the painting.
This work depicts the interior of Abercrombie’s first Chicago apartment, located in a now-demolished Hyde Park building at 57th Street and Harper Avenue. Mute grays and blues fill a room of simple furnishings. There is no bodily indentation in the bed, and no liquid in the white chalice on an adjoining table. The lamp’s shade matches one teal pillow, and the colors of both pulse more vibrantly than a square of glass at the top of the door—a window to the exterior, or a painted panel?
In a painting hung on its back wall, we see a red brick row house—the house Abercrombie moved into with her first husband.
The building stands alone on a stark plain, recalling rural space rather than Chicago sprawl. It was there that she painted the room in The Past and the Present and went on to spend the rest of her life. There’s disquiet in this meeting of past and present spaces, something unnamable emerging from their starkness.
Meanwhile, the doors. It’d be difficult to walk through or crawl into any of them. The one to the left of the blue bed would catch on the bed’s frame, and the two closets within the wall paneling are awkwardly high or awkwardly low. A colleague pointed out that even the main entry door might get stuck on the side table before it opens all the way.
This isn’t intentional, but I’m starting to write about the room like it’s a crime scene: noting details, discrepancies, imagined entrances and exits. This isn’t an investigation; I write this way because the painting doesn’t offer many places to go and I want to find one.
Or do I? Did Abercrombie?
Gertrude Abercrombie holding Mercy in front of her painting Self Portrait of My Sister, after 1941
Illinois State Museum, Dinah Abercrombie Livingston Archives. Courtesy of Illinois State Museum
Gertrude Abercrombie
I am not interested in complicated things nor in the commonplace, I like to paint simple things that are a little strange. My work comes directly from my inner consciousness and it must come easily.
—Gertrude Abercrombie
The contrast between the painting’s stillness and Abercrombie’s public life adds another layer of tension. She was the “doyenne” of a thriving South Side social scene, known for her buzzy parties and love of jazz music (composer Richie Powell based “Gertrude’s Bounce” on her singular gait). Yet The Past and the Present carries no trace of revelry, and I strain to imagine what music might fill the room.
The work’s uneasy relationship to sound and presence recalls Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Interior. The Music Room, Strandgade 30, a view of musical instruments in the artist’s sparse Copenhagen apartment. The instruments rest in cool-toned silence; it’s impossible to say when they were last played—or if they will be played again. Both Hammershøi and Abercrombie’s paintings threaten an unsettling stasis.
With closer attention, The Past and the Present offers another path. Though the sitting room doors are closed, and a frame surrounds the row house, two small details in the painting imply movement in and out of its world: a key hung to the left of the door frame, and a letter on the right-hand table.
key and letter
I needed to zoom all the way in to make out the tiny key’s contours. Perhaps its scale is relative to the space it takes up in the painter’s mind. However, its position inside the room implies choice—Abercrombie doesn’t need it to exit. She is not trapped; she chooses to be here.
The letter is small but unmistakable with its central scrawl and upper right-hand stamp. Letter-writing was an important part of Abercrombie’s relationships, conveying humor, reminiscence, and romantic feeling. Letters travel with a degree of uncertainty (they might be lost, unopened, torn, or waterlogged) but imply passage from one point to the next. This letter beams out of the painting like a weak beacon, illuminating Abercrombie’s ambiguous past, present, and future.
The Past and the Present draws our attention to the tension between moments in time, suggesting a gap between them that can be crossed but never fully closed. We feel the weight of this tension in the painting’s sparse, uncanny air. Abercrombie doesn’t try to suture a gap in memory; she lets it exist and paints what emerges.
—Lois Taylor Biggs, Rice Curatorial Fellow in Native American Art, Arts of the Americas
THREE further TASKS
- Listen to “Gertrude’s Bounce.”
- Learn more about Abercrombie and her Chicago surrealist milieu.
- Explore Abercrombie’s archived correspondence.
