10-Minute Challenge: A Surrealist Scene by Gertrude Abercrombie

You made it time. If you want to look a little longer, just scroll back up and press “Continue.”

Well. There’s a lot going on here, isn’t there? Compared with art we’ve studied in previous exercises — a 19th-century landscape, a mass-produced woodblock print, even a tapestry of a unicorn — this painting is quite different.

It’s hard to know where to begin, but we’ll start with the arresting woman in the center of the canvas. Her eyes are abnormally large, and she’s staring right at you:

Who is she?

Why is she holding that delicate string?

Why is one end tied around the neck of this cat, which is also looking directly at you?

Why is the other end connected to … this thing?

What is it? A phonograph horn? Part of a trumpet? A hat of some kind?

What about this inscrutable piece of paper mounted to the wall?

Is that a tiny key hanging from a nail?

Would it unlock those massive, strangely proportioned doors? What would it reveal on the other side?

And then there’s this picture-in-a-picture on the back wall. A white horse, a gnarled tree, a bright moon:

More to decode. More questions. More mystery.

Welcome to Gertrude Abercrombie’s visions.

Something about the curious arrangement of these objects makes your brain instantly go to work trying to relate them to one another, to make some meaningful connection.

But why does everything need to make sense?

That was one question posed by the Surrealist movement of the 1920s and ’30s, when artists like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte plumbed their unconscious minds, questioned rationality and produced dreamlike imagery.

Abercrombie’s paintings are a cousin to Dalí’s landscape of melting clocks:

And to Magritte’s uncanny scenes of men in bowler hats:

She once referred to Magritte as her “spiritual daddy.”

But her brand of surrealism was distinctly her own, said Eric Crosby, the director of Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, where this painting and dozens of others by Abercrombie were recently on view. Abercrombie offered a kind of Midwestern take on surrealism, with flat landscapes, evoking isolation and calm, but with unsettling scenes, too, leaving much unsaid.

“I like to paint simple things that are a little strange,” she said once.

In our painting, it is Gertrude herself in the salmon-colored dress. Her biography does offer some clues for decoding her visual language, but it can take us only so far.

“She was never the kind of person who would be like, ‘And this one is about my ex-husband,’” Mr. Crosby said. “The picture really only speaks to one reality and that is hers. Somehow we find a way to identify with it as we piece together the various disparate elements.”

Abercrombie was the only daughter of two opera singers. She spent some of her early years in Aledo, Ill., a small Midwestern town that would provide inspiration for some of her trees and landscapes:

Eventually, she landed in Chicago. Her first professional experience with art was drawing gloves for department store ads. In the late 1930s, she was paid $94 a month (around $2,100 in today’s dollars) by a federal works project that helped artists during the Great Depression. “That gave me a big start and a boost,” she told the oral historian Studs Terkel.

She lived for most of her life in a Victorian home in Hyde Park on Chicago’s South Side, where she held salons and jam sessions with poets and artists and musicians, like the jazz greats Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Her home was a welcome place for those who often didn’t feel welcome, including Black and gay people. By the standards of the 1940s, her lifestyle was utterly bohemian. A magazine profile listed the things of importance in her life: “art, tobacco, cats, jazz, sex.”

Through all of it, and most importantly for us, Gertrude Abercrombie painted her dreams.

“That’s fun to have dreams about something and then you paint them,” she told Terkel shortly before her death in 1977. “You don’t have to sit and worry about it at all. I never did sit and think about what to paint.”

When she painted our picture in 1948, Abercrombie was approaching the height of her career — showing her work often in galleries and in museums and selling paintings, but also dealing with a divorce and a second marriage. Mr. Crosby sees a woman in emotional limbo, moving from one phase of her life into the next. He notes that the title — “Where or When (Things Past)” — is a reference to the Rodgers and Hart standard “Where or When” from 1937. The lyrics go:

Some things that happen for the first time
Seem to be happening again
And so it seems that we have met before
And laughed before and loved before
But who knows where or when?

Like the jazz musicians she befriended, she used a set of recurring elements in her work, then riffed on and remixed them through the decades.

Things like the salmon-colored dress, the doors, the gnarled trees, the marble-topped table, the cat, the stray note, the moon, the flat Midwestern landscape and the picture-in-the-picture …

… appear over and over again in her work, in different permutations.

Our picture-in-the-picture here …

… calls back to a piece she painted just a year earlier, in 1947:

The woman in the salmon-colored dress above has been removed — and possibly transported — from this painting into ours. It’s a picture-in-a-picture that references a past picture. There’s jazz in that. And something elusive, too.

“She has a very eccentric way of painting her own emotional reality,” Mr. Crosby said. “She’s trying to understand herself better through the process of creating images. It takes time. For her it took decades. And even then there was still mystery.”

After looking at her work, he continued, “then you go out into the world; those simple things around you start looking strange.”

When it comes to art that seems strange at first, Mr. Crosby recommends embracing that strangeness. Look a little longer, a little closer than you normally would. Everyday objects — a door, a string, a table, a key — may reveal themselves to be weirder and more full of wonder than you thought possible.

Near the end of her life, when she was too weak to paint, she surrounded herself with her paintings, including the one we’ve just spent time with.

One more picture-in-a-picture, in a picture.

“There is magic everywhere if you stop and look and listen,” Abercrombie said. “Everything is strange.”

“Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery” will now travel to the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine, where it will be on view starting July 12.