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:

Three Trees and Three Clouds, 1938, is an early example of what became Gertrude Abercrombie’s signature landscape style, which features lifeless trees in ascetic settings. It was painted at the same time as she produced landscapes for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. Paintings done for the government-supported art projects tended to conform to the Regionalist mandate, in which the Midwestern countryside was depicted as lush and fertile, so as to project the hope for an abundant future in a post-Depression era. Abercrombie did many compositions that conform to this ideal, such as The Pump, 1938, a painting produced for the WPA (Western Illinois University Art Gallery, Macomb) or In the Country, 1939 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). All are inspired by the western Illinois landscape around Aledo, the hometown of her father’s family, where the artist spent many happy times with her beloved relatives. At the same time, she began to develop a bleaker, more personal approach to the landscape format, which developed into the dark, often moonlit, landscapes that dominate her work beginning in the early 1940s.

Consequently, the present work is a forerunner to the kind of landscape that is most often associated with Abercrombie. Its desolation conveys the loneliness that is seen fully in effect in later landscapes and in her austere interior scenes. Like her other early landscapes, Three Trees and Three Clouds is inspired by the rural area around Aledo, where dead trees were left to their own devices rather than be cut down. These dead trees and dark bottomed clouds were to become ubiquitous in her work, as well as the small, gentle, rolling hills that appear frequently in her early paintings.

Even as small and deceivingly simple as the present painting appears, it is composed in Abercrombie’s characteristically balanced manner, with the trees in the right foreground balanced by the hills in the left background, unified under the three clouds above. Likewise, while there are no humans in the landscape, the trees, like those in so many of her compositions, take on characteristics of the human body, the branches seeming to reach up to the clouds above. The isolation and loneliness that often emanates from the artist’s work, despite her popularity and wide circle of friends, as well as a sense of mystery, is unmistakably present in Three Trees and Three Clouds.