Meet the ‘Bop Artist’ Who Was Inspired by Dreams and Hosted Some Surreal Salons in Her Chicago Brownstone

Dizzy Gillespie mentioned his good friend Gertrude Abercrombie was in a position to translate the spirit of jazz music onto a canvas

Amy Crawford

– Contributing Author

March 2026

Jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie dubbed his good good friend Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977) “the bop artist … within the sense that she has taken the essence of our music and transported it into one other artwork kind.” Throughout her lifetime, Abercrombie was greatest identified for internet hosting salons—and rollicking jam classes—-at her Chicago brownstone, frequented by a various who’s-who of the town’s mid-century bohemian scene.

Nonetheless, the self-taught painter, who claimed to be impressed principally by desires, “by no means thought-about herself an insider to the artwork world,” says Thomas Busciglio-Ritter, curator of American artwork on the Milwaukee Artwork Museum, which can host “Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery,” the largest-ever touring retrospective of Abercrombie’s mysterious canvases, starting in March. He provides that though she loved enjoying with labels—whether or not “bop artist” or “surrealist”—she would in the end “chortle it off, as a result of she was her personal self.”  

It’s an angle that appears to resonate with up to date audiences, he says, as Abercrombie’s repute has grown over the previous 20 years. “I feel persons are particularly drawn to the weirdness of her artwork, and simply how private and on the market it was.”

Abercrombie’s iconography may very well be without delay deeply symbolic and easily literal. “She would say, ‘It’s only a shell,’ or ‘It’s only a tree,’” Busciglio-Ritter says. “You don’t essentially need to determine it out.”