Figuratively Speaking

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

The Artist

Hugh Cameron, Benton Harbor, Michigan, gift from the Artist

Thence by descent to the present owner

Exhibited:

New York, New York, Karma, Gertrude Abercrombie, August 9 - September 23, 2018 (as Shell Miniature)

Literature:

Robert Storr, Susan Weininger, Robert Cozzolino, Dinah Livingston, Studs Terkel, Gertrude Abercrombie, New York, 2018, p. 396 (as Shell Miniature)

Lot Essay:

A Shell for Hugh Cameron

In the early 1950s, Gertrude Abercrombie was encouraged by her friend, the artist John Wilde, to paint more carefully and with more detail. As a result, she became interested in still life painting, often lavishing attention on the objects she chose to create extremely naturalistic images. She tried, sometimes successfully, to achieve this goal; in late 1951 Abercrombie wrote to Wilde that she wished he could see the shells she was painting, so she must have been proud of her achievements in this area. A beautiful, highly detailed painting of shells on a beach by Wilde, dated 1951 (now in the Madison Museum of contemporary Art), was in her estate and must have provided her with firsthand inspiration. In 1952, Abercrombie made the present small painting for her friend Hugh Cameron.

In addition, in the early part of the decade, Abercrombie worked assiduously, necessitated at least in part by concerns over money. Her marriage to Bob Livingston, a lawyer and good provider, ended in 1948 and she married Frank Sandiford, a petty criminal turned record store salesperson, which changed her economic situation. She produced numerous tiny paintings, often of single shells, that were sometimes made into pins or brooches with frames of the artist’s design fabricated by a jeweler and sold at local art fairs. These could be produced relatively rapidly and were very popular. Archival records indicate that many of these minute paintings, such as this one, were made for, and given as presents to, her good friends. Very small shell paintings were made as special gifts for artist friends Karl Priebe, Jerry Karidis, and Frances Strain Biesel; family members such as her cousin Maurine Campbell; jazz great Dizzy Gillespie; and friends Bill O’Nan and Esther Wilcox. Hugh Cameron was a close friend from the 1950s until the end of Abercrombie’s life and owned a number of her works.

The shell was a significant subject for Abercrombie, who was drawn to interior spaces from an early point in her career. She often painted the austere interior that was her own room and which represented a kind of prison, corresponding to her own feelings of entrapment, insecurity, and loneliness. The shell is another kind of room, a simple space from which there is no escape, echoing the constructed spaces she so often represented. Abercrombie almost certainly had a collection of shells on which she modelled her paintings and there are several types that recur regularly. Shells such as this conch are seen alone and as part of more complicated still life compositions. For example, this shell, with its small irregular break that looks like a tiny window, makes an appearance in the large Shell and Drape, 1952 (formerly Maurer Collection, Chicago). Although Abercrombie used many of the same elements in her paintings, she did not usually repeat a composition. One of the ways she distinguished the small paintings of single shells was by varying the backgrounds and the size relationship between setting and shell. This Shell is set on a black surface against a pink background. It is significant that Hugh Cameron owned another painting by Abercrombie that has the same color scheme, but with a different kind of shell as the subject. This tiny painting attests to Abercrombie’s care and attention to even the smallest objects she created.