A new exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, 'Gertrude and Friends: The Wisconsin Magic Realists,' highlights a group of artists active in the Midwest from the early 1940s who challenged the dominant American Regionalism aesthetic. The show features 17 works by artists including John Wilde, Karl Priebe, Sylvia Fein, Marshall Glasier, and Dudley Huppler, who were friends and correspondents of the eccentric painter Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-77). The exhibition is designed as a companion to a major Abercrombie retrospective that is currently touring the United States, having originated at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art and now on view at the Colby College Museum of Art.
The exhibition matters because it brings long-overdue attention to a tightknit circle of Magic Realist artists who, despite their influence and mutual support, never had an official group show during their lifetimes. By contextualizing Abercrombie's rising art-world profile within her social and creative network, the show expands the narrative of mid-20th-century American art beyond the familiar Regionalist canon. It also underscores the importance of Chicago and the Upper Midwest as a vibrant, eccentric hub of surrealist-inflected painting, challenging the notion that such innovation was limited to coastal art centers.