Gertrude Abercrombie Painting, Bought for $30 at an Estate Sale, Sets $1.3 M. Auction Record

Plucked from an estate sale in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for $30, Gertrude Abercombie’s Alderman Merriam’s Shells (1951) sold for $1.35 million at Freeman’s auction house on October 1.

The final bid far surpassed the lot’s $250,000 estimate, setting a new auction benchmark for the late Surrealist painter. For Freeman’s New York, success was almost guaranteed. Alderman Merriam’s Shells arrived on the block buoyed by its sensational rediscovery: the enigmatic still life of seashells scattered in darkness had vanished for decades, much to the dismay of Abercrombie’s ravenous market. In reality, it languished in Michigan until a sharp-eyed shopper rescued it from an estate sale.

“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, said in a statement.

Its eventual consignor, a collector of vinyl records and vintage furniture, arrived late to the sale, describing it as “picked over.” The painting was tucked away in a hallway at the rear of the building near the garage; further obscured in the lower-left corner of the canvas was the inscription “abercrombie ’51.”

“Uncertain but intrigued,” its finder brought the canvas to the Milwaukee Art Museum, which was then hosting an Abercrombie survey. As luck would have it, the exhibition catalog contained an archival photograph of the very painting, originally reproduced in a 1952 Chicago Review piece on Abercrombie’s exhibition at Newman Brown Gallery. The owner then contacted Susan Weininger, a prominent Abercrombie expert, who confirmed that the work was, in fact, Alderman Merriam’s Shells (1951).

According to Freeman’s, the shells belonged to Robert Merriam, who served as alderman of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, where Abercrombie lived and worked. Alderman Merriam’s Shells was exhibited in Chicago, New York, and Milwaukee in 1952 and 1953, but Abercrombie ultimately gifted the painting to John Reynolds, a doctor in Kalamazoo, as payment for an operation. The so-called “Queen of Chicago,” Abercrombie animated the city’s midcentury art scene, with artists and intellectuals gathering in her Hyde Park brownstone as if at a salon.

Her regional renown exploded onto the global art scene in 2018, when a Karma gallery show declared her a “critical, under-considered fixture of midcentury American Surrealism.” Since then, 80 of her paintings have fetched more than $100,000 at auction, with the majority exceeding their high estimates, according to the Artnet Price Database.

Alderman Merriam’s Shells depicted nine finely realized seashells, one suspended by a thread above a void. Sparse, aesthetic interiors were Abercrombie’s defining setting, while seashells became a recurring motif and “personal emblems,” according to Freeman’s. The house added that, “The shell is another kind of home, at once protective and confining, a contained space that may have also appealed to Abercrombie thematically.”