A painting that once changed hands for the price of a tank of gas just became the most expensive work by its artist ever sold. "Alderman Merriam's Shells," an 8-by-11-inch 1951 painting by the Chicago surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie, sold for $1.3 million with premium at Freeman's in New York on October 1 — more than six times its $200,000 high estimate, and a new world auction record for the artist.
The painting's path to the block began decades earlier and a world away from Manhattan's auction houses. Abercrombie reportedly traded the small canvas to Dr. John Reynolds, a physician in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the early 1980s in exchange for surgical services. It passed down through his estate and, this past summer, turned up at an estate sale for $30, where it was picked up by a collector who didn't immediately know what they had.
The breakthrough came later, after the buyer visited "Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery," a touring retrospective at the Milwaukee Art Museum, and recognized an archival photograph of the painting in the show's catalog. That prompted a formal authentication by Abercrombie scholar Susan Weininger and consignment to Freeman's.
The record easily beat the artist's previous high of $1 million, set by "Message for Mercy" (1950) at Sotheby's last November — a jump of roughly 33 percent in under a year, reflecting a broader surge of market interest in Abercrombie's moody, moon-lit still lifes and self-portraits.
"No fairytale would be complete without a storybook ending."
— Zack Wirsum, Freeman's head of post-war and contemporary art
Auctioneer David Weiss, who ran the sale, had a simpler takeaway for the saleroom afterward: "Keep going to those estate sales."
Abercrombie, who died in 1977, spent much of her career painting in relative obscurity from her South Side Chicago home, where she hosted jazz musicians including Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins. Interest in her work has climbed steadily as museums reassess postwar American surrealists outside the male canon, with institutions including the Milwaukee Art Museum giving her a dedicated retrospective this year. Collectors and auction houses now expect more sleeper Abercrombies to surface — and estate-sale pickers everywhere to start looking twice at small, strange paintings of shells, cats and empty rooms.