As the surreal miniature paintings of the US artist Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-77) have drawn more art world interest, so have the wild parties she was said to have hosted regularly at her brownstone in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighbourhood. Parties that earned the eccentric mid-20th-century artist nicknames such as the “Jazz Witch” and “Queen of Chicago”. But who was on Abercrombie’s guest list? As it turns out, other weird and wonderful artists.
A new show at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Gertrude and Friends: The Wisconsin Magic Realists, hopes to share some of Abercrombie’s recent limelight with a tightknit group of artists active in the cities of Milwaukee, Madison and Chicago, as of the early 1940s. Works by these artists challenged the dominant American Regionalism aesthetic of the time and depicted the American Midwest in ways that stretched the limits of traditional Realism.
A companion show
The group exhibition of 17 works intentionally overlaps with the museum’s turn to show the major Abercrombie travelling retrospective that began at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art earlier this year. The survey is now on view at the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine (until 11 January 2026), and will travel to the Norton Museum of Art in Florida after showing in Milwaukee in March. Gertrude and Friends is intended as a sort of companion to the survey show.
“I hope that through a ripple effect people will also gravitate towards the people who were [Abercrombie’s] friends during her lifetime, and very much had the same sort of artistic intent,” says the exhibition’s curator, Thomas Busciglio-Ritter. “Exploring the world in a sort of strange, eerie, fantastical way, disturbing their viewers. They were all just a bunch of playful people, who were also thinking about their place as artists in society at that time, in very different ways.”
These artists included ringleaders John Wilde and Karl Priebe, as well as Sylvia Fein, Marshall Glasier and Dudley Huppler. They were in close communication and supported each other, despite not being a formal movement and never having an official group exhibition in their lifetimes. Abercrombie and Priebe, in particular, were close and wrote letters to each other almost daily. And when Abercrombie hosted the Wisconsin crew for a party, she had a special ritual if Priebe was in attendance—as Priebe was afraid of dogs, she would move her stuffed dog (part of her unique décor) outside until he left.
A portrait painted by Wilde illustrates the group’s special camaraderie. In it, Priebe stands to the far left alongside Abercrombie with her arm around Huppler’s shoulder (the two chuckle as though sharing a joke, among otherwise deadpan expressions). To the right of them are Glasier, Fein, a nude described simply as “a friend”, the artist (and intelligence officer) Arnold Dadian, and finally Wilde, who painted himself in a checkered blazer and vest matching the checkerboard floor.
The painting once belonged to Abercrombie, and after her death her trust decided to gift it to the museum. “There’s a beautiful letter in which she says she doesn’t want to hang that work,” Busciglio-Ritter. says “She wants to keep it on her lap and reminisce about the good times they had together.”
• Gertrude and Friends: The Wisconsin Magic Realists, Milwaukee Art Museum, until July 2026
