Episode No. 697 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features curator Sarah Humphreville and author Marisa Anne Bass.
With Eric Crosby, Humphreville is the co-curator of “Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World is a Mystery.” The exhibition survey’s Abercrombie’s synthesis of surrealism, landscape, portraiture and still-life, and is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to date. It is at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh through June 1 before traveling to the Colby College Museum of Art. An excellent catalogue was co-published by the Carnegie, Colby, and DelMonico Books. Amazon and Bookshop offer it for $50-55.
Bass is the author of The Monument’s End: Public Art and the Modern Republic, which was recently released by Princeton University Press. The book finds the origin of many of today’s questions around monuments and memory within the early modern Netherlands. Among the artists Bass discusses are Rembrandt, Dirck van Delen, Hendrick de Keyser, Spencer Finch, Thomas Hirschhorn, and more. Bass is a professor at Yale University. Her previous books include Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt and Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity. Amazon and Bookshop offer “The Monument’s End” for $20-42.
Instagram: Sarah Humphreville, Marisa Bass, Tyler Green.
Air date: March 13, 2025.

Gertrude Abercrombie, White Cat. ca. 1938.

Gertrude Abercrombie, There on the Table, 1935.

Gertrude Abercrombie, Tree at Aledo, 1938.

Gertrude Abercrombie, Interior, 1938.

Gertrude Abercrombie, Slaughterhouse Ruins at Aledo, 1937.

Gertrude Abercrombie, Charlie Parker’s Favorite Painting, 1946.

Gertrude Abercrombie, Doors, 4 and Cats, 1956.

Gertrude Abercrombie, Doors (3 Demolition), 1957.

Gertrude Abercrombie, Out in the Country, 1939.


Dirck van Delen, A Family before the Mausoleum of William I in Delft’s Nieuwe Kerk, 1645.
No longer known artist, The Thumb from the Statue of the Duke of Alba, 1717-19.

Hendrick de Keyser, Erasmus of Rotterdam, ca. 1618-22.

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis, 1661-62.
