Grace Hartigan
Grace Hartigan
1922 - 2008
American painter (see fig.). After studying briefly with local Newark painter Isaac Lane Muse (1906–96), Hartigan moved to New York in 1945. There she was profoundly influenced by Jackson Pollock’s one-man exhibition held in 1948 at the BETTY PARSONS GALLERY, and her earliest works (1948–52) were large-scale abstract canvases resembling those of Pollock and Willem de Kooning. These works were included in the important New Talent (1950; New York, Kootz Gal.) and Ninth Street (1951; New York, 60 E Ninth Street) exhibitions. In 1952 Hartigan departed from non-representational art and made free variations upon Old Master paintings, as well as collaborating with the poet Frank O’Hara to produce 12 poem/paintings entitled Oranges. These experiments culminated in a series of imaginative portraits, shop window scenes, still-lifes, and cityscapes created between 1953 and 1960; in works such as City Life (1956; Washington, DC, N. Trust Hist. Preserv.) Hartigan captured the excitement and complexity of modern urban life while embodying the gestural style of the Abstract Expressionists.
In 1959 Hartigan married and moved to Baltimore, which she made her permanent home, and continued to expand her range of subjects and styles (see fig.). Her themes varied from movie stars to modern interpretations of historical figures, such as the foppish Young Louis (1983; New York, Met.). Her style alternated between lyrical and colourful stained canvases, paintings splattered with pigment, and deliberately complex and discordant brush-drawn works, while always exhibiting Abstract Expressionist tendencies toward projecting surface, overall design, and discovery during the painting process, and consistently exploring modern views of history, celebrity, urban existence, and other concerns of our age (see fig.). Generally associated with the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, Hartigan, in both her methods and her themes, took her art well beyond the limits that such a description would suggest. [Robert Saltonstall Mattison. "Hartigan, Grace." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 8, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T036782.]
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