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:

Lula Janes Abercrombie, the Artist's mother, until 1961

Bequeathed to Karl Priebe by the above, Milwaukee, received 1968

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

Exhibited:

Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, 14th Annual International Water Color Exhibition, May 21-June 2, 1935, no. 176 (as She and I)

Lot Essay:

Although Gertrude Abercrombie worked in oil paint far more than watercolors, she produced a number of lovely images in this medium, primarily in the early years of her career. She and I is an early work that originally belonged to the artist’s mother, who left it in her will to Abercrombie’s dear friend, the artist Karl Priebe, who had expressed an interest in it as early as 1955 in a letter to Gertrude. Karl, however, did not receive the painting immediately after Jane Abercrombie’s death in 1961. After much pleading with Gertrude, he ultimately took possession of the watercolor in 1968. After his death in 1976, the works in his collection were sold in an auction in September 1980, at which time She and I was acquired by Dr. and Mrs. Roger Parr, fellow Milwaukee residents. The Milwaukee artist Jerry Karidis, another good friend of Abercrombie’s, urged the Parrs and other friends to acquire Abercrombie paintings from the auction. The inscription on the backing board, which incorrectly dates the watercolor, was likely added by someone at the time of this sale.

Abercrombie once said, “it is always myself that I paint,” and it is true that she is present in her work in one way or another from the very beginning of her career until she ceased to paint toward the end of her life. Even before she was employed on the Federal Art Project and its precursor, the Public Works of Art Project in 1933, she was doing portraits of herself, her friends, and family members. And also like many young artists, she created self-portraits as the sitter was always available. In 1934, when She and I was painted, Abercrombie was working as a commercial artist doing catalog illustrations for department stores and lived with her parents out of economic necessity. At this time, she experimented working in watercolor as well as oil, making images of herself that ranged from a sweet ca. 1932 watercolor (Private Collection); to a forbidding self-portrait from 1934 (sold at Sotheby’s, 2019); to her earliest known painting, 1929 (formerly Rickey Austin Collection, location unknown); and also from 1929, in the glamorous guise of the actress Greta Garbo, one of her idols. 

In She and I, Abercrombie paints herself with one of her cats, a frequent companion and alter ego, who is placed on a pedestal next to the artist. Perhaps the best comparison to She and I, however, is the artist’s haunting woodblock print, Cat and I, ca. 1940, in which Abercrombie and the black cat next to her look out at the viewer with identically shaped eyes that only differ in the color of the pupils. The black of the cat and the white of the artist’s face serve to emphasize the similarity between the two, who appear like mirror images. As in She and I, Abercrombie wears a beret in the print, perhaps alluding to her role as an artist. Likewise, the eyes of cat and artist in the watercolor echo each other in much the same way as they do in Cat and I. This “twinning” is not surprising from a person who, when pregnant with her only child, Dinah, several years later said that she could imagine giving birth to a cat but not a human.

The angularity of the pedestal and the flattened, clear linearity of her clothing indicate an interest in modernist styles such as Cubism, which Abercrombie had experimented with in other works during this period, although she did not pursue it for long. As in her mature paintings, the present watercolor is carefully balanced using color (the blue of the beret and her clothing), shape (the curve of the cat’s body and the artist’s hair), as well as the wonderfully repeating eyes of the cat and the artist. She and I is a beautiful illustration of a theme Abercrombie would pursue for the full extent of her career, that of the relationship of the mysterious cat and the (mysterious) human, as well as evidence of her cognizance and interest in styles that ultimately didn’t serve her as well as the “simple things that are a little strange” that became her hallmark. It serves as an early example of the enigmatic connection that Abercrombie would go on to explore directly, subtly, wittily, and in innumerable other ways throughout her career.