Post War and Contemporary Art featuring A Vision in Color: A Curated Session by Emily Friedman

We are grateful for the research conducted by Susan Weininger, Professor Emerita, Roosevelt University.

Provenance:

Karl Priebe, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Sold: Milwaukee Auction Galleries, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Priebe Estate Sale, September 9-21, 1980

Acquired at the above sale by the present owners

Lot Essay:

Like Gertrude Abercrombie’s other landscapes of the same period, Moonlight and Landscape with Tree (Tree Lady), 1944, is stark and dark. There are two lifeless trees, one in the right foreground, and one in the left rear, which emerge from the green ground under a bleak moonlit sky, familiar elements within the artist’s oeuvre. Her trees often are suggestive of humans, with branches that resemble arms. If a human is present, her trees frequently respond and resonate with their actions. For example, in Owl on the Moon, 1948 (Illinois State University, Normal) the branches of the tree frame the owl on the moon but also respond to the figure of the artist who reaches out with a pointed finger toward the tree. In Owl Trainer #2, 1947, a figure gestures to an owl seated on the ground with a pointed forefinger, which is echoed by the end of a tree branch that bears seated owls.  

In Moonlight and Landscape with Tree (Tree Lady), the trees have an even stronger relationship to the human form. The two branches of the tree in the foreground stretch up to the sky and terminate with handlike forms. The tree in the rear is stranger still—it is truncated and hollowed out. But its most peculiar aspect is what looks like a large egg that emerges from the hollow. These ideas may presage some that are worked out by the artist in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when she painted a number of variations on the theme of a figure materializing from a hollow tree. In each case the female figure is clearly Abercrombie herself.

It is not surprising that this was a theme that interested the artist, and her earliest work points to the connection she saw between the many dead trees she saw around Aledo, the Western Illinois town that was home to her father’s family. Aledo, where she spent time with her extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, came to signify the warmth and joy she did not experience as an only child of very strict parents. The present work may reflect the landscape that was so familiar to her, but it may also be her earliest foray into animating the trees that would become homes for her figures in later paintings. It would also explain why the large white egg emerges from the hollow tree, a sign of continued fertility despite the clearly lifeless enclosure from which it appears. Whether or not this composition is in fact a forerunner of the tree ladies of a slightly later period, it is clearly an image that animates the inanimate, makes the real world recognizable but “a little strange,” something we see in Abercrombie’s work throughout her career. It is this combination of the recognizable world with mystery and magic that makes this seemingly simple painting perpetually interesting.