Somewhere Out There

Lot Note:
The present painting of a large ostrich egg and tiny dinosaur in a barren landscape combines Gertrude Abercrombie’s distinctive simplicity with the personal references so characteristic of her art. The ostrich egg was a possession that Abercrombie acquired in a magical and mysterious way. She related its manifestation to Studs Terkel in a 1977 interview on the occasion of a large retrospective of her paintings at the Chicago Hyde Park Art Center. When asked about the egg, she states, “It was a dream. Yes, I dreamed it up. I just thought of it and then I got the real ostrich egg. Somebody gave me one. I painted many ostrich eggs and then somebody gave me one.” This was not an unusual occurrence for Abercrombie, who often dreamed of the subjects of her paintings, which would then miraculously appear in the waking world. This sense of mystery was part of the way the artist described her process. Like the other recurring objects in her work (cats, owls, stoneware vases and compotes, gloves, bunches of grapes), the ostrich egg was a personal emblem that in some ways stood for the artist herself. 
 
Although Abercrombie began in the mid-1950s to paint eggs in numerous still life paintings, the ostrich egg makes its first appearance around 1963. Despite the claim that she painted many ostrich eggs, only two other images can be identified that include this egg. One painting appears in a ca. 1970 photograph of Abercrombie working in her studio (reproduced in the Karma Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2018, pp. 69-70, location unknown), a very simple oval painting of the egg in a stark, uninhabited landscape surmounted by a typical Abercrombie-esque cloud. The Ostrich Egg, 1963 (Springfield, Illinois State Museum), is likewise an oval painting of the egg in the same simplified landscape with a tiny white ostrich beside and behind it. This painting is visible in a 1977 photograph of Abercrombie holding the egg in her home on Dorchester Avenue (Karma exhibition catalogue, pp. 104-5). The typical wittiness of the artist’s juxtaposition is repeated in numerous variations of a chicken and egg in other works. 
 
The Dinosaur, is comparable to the other two known works with ostrich eggs. With its tiny black dinosaur beside and behind the huge central egg, the space is intentionally ambiguous. It is difficult to tell how large the creature is in relation to the egg, typical of Abercrombie’s surreal, or magical realist, imagination. The clouds, a small black one over the dinosaur and a large fluffy white one over the egg, act to both augment the meaning of the image and balance the deceptively simple composition. The artist was very skillful at creating believable, three-dimensional objects and the egg is a beautiful testament to that proficiency. An exquisitely rendered object, it contrasts with the flat, almost simplistic, black dinosaur. The beautiful green blue color palette is characteristic of much of her work of this period. The Dinosaur is a fine example of Abercrombie’s late career and shows her mastery of an economy of means to create a composition that is not only flawless but smart, witty, and thought-provoking, in the spirit of the best of her work.