A small oil painting that spent decades gathering dust in a Michigan home sold at auction this month for more than $1.35 million — a record for the Chicago surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie, whose work had sold for just $30 at an estate sale months earlier.
According to the Chicago Sun-Times, a professional "picker" was browsing a July estate sale in search of old albums and mid-century furniture when he noticed an 8-by-11-inch canvas of nine shells hanging in a hallway near the garage. A faint signature read "Abercrombie, 51." He paid $30 and took a chance.
The painting's path to authentication was almost as improbable as its price. The consignor, who has asked to remain anonymous, happened to be touring a retrospective of Abercrombie's work at the Milwaukee Art Museum over the summer and spotted a photograph of the same composition in the exhibition catalog. That match identified it as "Alderman Merriam's Shells," a 1951 work depicting shells that once belonged to Robert Merriam, who represented Chicago's 5th Ward on the city council from 1947 to 1955. The piece hadn't been publicly seen in nearly 75 years.
Pre-sale estimates ran as high as $250,000 when Freeman's listed the work for its Post-War & Contemporary Art sale on October 1. Bidding blew past that mark, with the hammer falling at $1.06 million — about $1.35 million once the buyer's premium was added, according to coverage syndicated by CNN. It was the first time an Abercrombie painting had crossed the $1 million mark at auction, Chicago's public radio station reported.
Abercrombie, known in her lifetime as the "queen of the bohemian artists," ran a Hyde Park salon frequented by jazz musicians including Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins, and her dreamlike, often self-referential paintings have drawn renewed museum attention in recent years. For the picker who spotted her signature in a dim hallway, the sale offered a tidy return: roughly 45,000 times what he paid for it.