A $30 Estate-Sale Painting Just Made $1.35 Million, a Record for Gertrude Abercrombie

Somebody paid $30 for a painting at a picked-over estate sale in Kalamazoo, Michigan. On Oct. 1 it sold for $1.35 million. Gertrude Abercrombie’s Alderman Merriam’s Shells (1951) sailed past its $250,000 estimate at Freeman’s New York and set a new auction record for the late Chicago Surrealist, ARTnews reports.

The finder, a collector of vinyl records and vintage furniture, got to the sale late. The canvas was tucked in a hallway near the garage, with “abercrombie ’51” inscribed in the lower-left corner. Unsure but intrigued, the finder took it to the Milwaukee Art Museum, which happened to be hosting an Abercrombie survey. The exhibition catalog reproduced an archival photo of the very same painting from a 1952 Chicago Review article, and scholar Susan Weininger confirmed it.

As happy as we are to have recaptured the record sale price for an artist we have long championed, we are even happier for our eagle-eyed consignor who saved this masterpiece.

Zack Wirsum, Freeman’s senior vice president, ARTnews

The picture itself is eerie and quiet: nine finely painted seashells scattered across a dark surface, one hanging by a thread above a void. The shells belonged to Robert Merriam, an alderman in Hyde Park, where Abercrombie lived. She later gave the painting to a Kalamazoo doctor, John Reynolds, as payment for an operation, according to Freeman’s.

Read moreKarl-Anthony Towns and Jordyn Woods’s Curated Sotheby’s Sale Just Set a Record

Abercrombie’s Hyde Park brownstone doubled as a salon, and the music was half the point. She was part of Chicago’s jazz scene and counted Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Sarah Vaughan as friends, Wikipedia notes. Gillespie played her 1948 wedding, and she hosted jam sessions at home.

the first bop artist. Bop in the sense that she has taken the essence of our music and transported it to another art form

Dizzy Gillespie, on Gertrude Abercrombie, Wikipedia

Her market has caught up with the legend. A 2018 show at Karma gallery called her a “critical, under-considered fixture of midcentury American Surrealism,” and since then, 80 of her paintings have sold for more than $100,000 at auction, per the Artnet Price Database cited by ARTnews.

Freeman’s Zack Wirsum had told visitors to the Milwaukee show only weeks earlier that Abercrombies still turn up at estate sales now and then. “Little did I know that one of those ‘once in a while’s would occur less than a month later,” he said in September, per ARTnews.