It’s the stuff of desires for a treasure-hunting flea market purchaser. Or, within the phrases of the public sale home that offered it on Thursday, “the little portray that might”.
On Thursday (1 October) at Freeman’s public sale home in New York, a portray by the once-obscure figurative painter Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-77), which was purchased at an property sale in Michigan final summer time for a mere $30, blew previous its excessive estimate of $200,000 and in the end offered for $1.3m.
The premium inclusive-price, paid for the 8in-by-11in portray titled Alderman Merriam’s Shells (1951), marked a brand new world public sale file worth for the artist. It represents a 33% leap from her earlier public sale file of $1m, achieved at Sotheby’s by Message for Mercy (1950), additionally offered in New York, final November, based on information web site Arthur Analytics. The public sale excessive for the artist has shot up lately. As of early 2025 the secondary-market file for her work was nonetheless beneath $1m, at $864,000.
“Preserve going to these property gross sales,” stated auctioneer David Weiss, a Freeman’s senior vp, initially of the bidding. Even the low finish of the presale estimate, at $150,000, represented a worth 5,000 instances what the fortunate eagle-eyed purchaser received it for from the property sale.
Swapped for surgical companies
Following a peripatetic childhood trailing her two singer dad and mom, Abercrombie finally settled in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighbourhood, the place she was a key determine in a vibrant group of artists and musicians. The artist counted well-known jazz musicians Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker as private pals.
She had traded Alderman Merriam’s Shells to a physician named John Reynolds in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in alternate for unspecified surgical companies rendered to her. Reynolds was the one proprietor, as confirmed by knowledgeable Susan Weininger, way back to the early Eighties. He loaned it to a number of necessary museum exhibits however the work finally vanished into his property.
Freeman’s head of post-war and up to date artwork Zack Wirsum described his response upon first seeing a picture of the work as “gobsmacked”. It was the weekend of 4 July, and he was making ready to go on a hike within the woods of Sizzling Springs Mountain in Arkansas together with his household.
“I received an electronic mail saying, ‘discovered Gertrude Abercrombie portray’. I get a whole lot of these, so I didn’t have excessive hopes,” Wirsum tells The Artwork Newspaper. “As quickly as I clicked on the picture I believe I exclaimed an expletive, and I knew that it was simply an unbelievable instance by her. And one I had by no means seen.”
Abercrombie by no means actually had actual gallery illustration—a few of her works had been displayed and offered at shops resembling Marshall Fields—however the work, typically depicting lone figures and objects towards eerie backdrops and floating, oddball parts, mesmerised many viewers and drew a faithful, if fairly regional following.
A 2018 exhibition organised by the curator Dan Nadel on the New York gallery Karma, helped jumpstart curiosity and was adopted by an acclaimed present on the Elmhurst Artwork Museum, outdoors Chicago, organised by Jenny Gibbs. In a earlier deep dive into Abercrombie’s artwork, Nadel stated her work had “sparked one thing” and marked a “type pop magic second within the Midwest” within the years following the Second World Warfare.
Following the record-smashing sale, Wirsum stated in a press release: “No fairytale could be full with no storybook ending.” He known as the outcome “as fortunately ever after because it will get”.
Wirsum, who’s the son of the well-known Furry Who artist Karl Wirsum, added that he and the public sale home crew are “even happier for our eagle-eyed consignor who saved this masterpiece from staying ceaselessly misplaced to time”.
