At a Michigan estate sale in July, a “treasure hunter” noticed an undisturbed painting hanging in a hallway depicting a series of seashells on a dark grey and black field.
More than the shells, it was the signature located in the bottom-left corner, which read “Abercrombie ’51” that piqued his interest.
Though the hunter didn’t know it at the time, his turning over of $30 for the piece was to be one of the best bargains he’d ever secure, as the surname belonged to renowned post-War surrealist painter Gertrude Abercrombie.
In a simply delicious coincidence, not only did the buyer find the piece, hanging on the wall, ignored by other perusers, but he made a detour on a family vacation in Milwaukee to visit a touring Abercrombie exhibition called “Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery.”
Therein, he saw an archival picture of nothing less than his “$30” artwork within the exhibition catalogue. One could say he was enlivened by the discovery.
After a nationally-recognized Abercrombie expert authenticated the piece as an original, Freeman’s Auctions in New York agreed to handle the sale of the piece, with the opening bid set at $75,000.
Zachary Wirsum, the Head of Department: Post War and Contemporary Art at Freeman’s, said in a statement about the find that he himself had only just told someone at the exhibit that Abercrombie’s works still surface once in awhile at estate sales.
“Little did I know that one of those ‘once in a while’s would occur less than a month later,” he said.
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Alderman Merriam’s Shells was completed in late 1951, and, according to Abercrombie’s own records, given early in 1952 to Dr. John Reynolds as payment for an operation.
It depicts several shells in the collection of Robert Merriam, who served as the Chicago Alderman of the 5th ward from 1947-55, which included the Hyde Park neighborhood where Abercrombie lived for most of her life, per Freeman’s Auctions.
Freeman’s lot note on the painting includes this description of the item and its resonance within Abercrombie’s life.
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“Throughout the artist’s career, she painted rooms, usually spare and ascetic, closed and impenetrable, which resonated with her own feelings of loneliness and insecurity. Abercrombie also did many paintings in which tents, a more precarious kind of enclosure, feature prominently.”
“The shell is another kind of home, at once protective and confining, a contained space that may have also appealed to Abercrombie thematically. She even played with this idea in her compositions that depict a woman, rather than a snail, emerging from a shell.”
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