Grace Hartigan

Grace Hartigan was an American abstract expressionist painter and a significant member of the vibrant New York School of the 1950s and 1960s. Her circle of friends, who frequently inspired one another in their artistic endeavors, included Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem and Elaine de Kooning and Frank O'Hara. Her paintings are held by numerous major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. As director of the Maryland Institute College of Art's Hoffberger School of Painting, she influenced numerous young artists.

Career
Early years
In 1945, Hartigan moved to New York City, and became a member of the downtown artistic community. Her friends included Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning and Elaine de Kooning, Frank O'Hara and Knox Martin. Hartigan gained her reputation as part of the New York School of artists and painters that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. She was selected by Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro for the New Talent exhibition at Koontz Gallery in New York in 1950. The following year she had her first solo exhibition.

Hartigan was often thought of as a "second generation Abstract Expressionist", being heavily influenced by her colleagues of the time. Her early career was characterized by experiments with total abstraction, as seen in the work Six by Six (1951) currently in the collection of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center in Poughkeepsie, NY. Beginning in the early fifties, Hartigan began to incorporate more recognizable motifs and characters into her paintings. Also during this time, she exhibited under the name George Hartigan in an attempt to achieve greater recognition for her work. She started to use Grace as her first name in 1953.

1950s and 1960s
In 1952-1953, Hartigan collaborated with her close friend and poet Frank O'Hara on a series of 12 paintings called "Oranges", based on O'Hara's series of poems by the same name. The paintings integrated some of the text of the poems and were exhibited during her third solo show on March 31, 1953, at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

On April 18, 1953, Alfred Barr and Dorothy Miller selected The Persian Jacket (1952) for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Two months later, Barr secured a patron to buy the painting for $400 and donate it to the museum. Hartigan became the first of the second generation abstract expressionists to have a piece in the museum. In February 1954, she had a sold-out exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery. River Bathers (1953) was purchased by a collector (Alexander Bing) for $1,000 and gifted to the Museum of Modern Art. The Whitney Museum acquired Greek Girl.

In the summer of 1954, Hartigan started to use her first name instead of George. In October 1954, her work was included in the exhibition Paintings from the Museum Collection at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1954, she sold $5,500 worth of work, (compared to Bill de Kooning's $7,000 during that same period).

In 1956, Hartigan's paintings were included in the 12 Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as in The New American Painting, which traveled throughout Europe from 1958 to 1959. She received significant press coverage as she was one of few women at this time to receive this level of exposure. Subsequently, she was featured in Life magazine in 1957 and Newsweek in 1959. Life referred to Hartigan as "the most celebrated of the young American women painters."

Hartigan's work around this time shifted, and she began creating more transparent paintings and watercolor collages. In an explanation of this change she said, "I have left the groan and the anguish behind. The cry has become a song." Examples of these paintings include Phoenix, William of Orange, and Lily Pond (all completed in 1962). Also in 1962, Hartigan painted Monroe, marking another shift in her work toward more anxiety-laden imagery. The Hunted (1963), Human Fragment (1963), and Mistral (1964) are representations of this mindset and approach to painting. JFK's assassination and the rise of Pop art (a movement Hartigan vehemently opposed) occurred around this time. She said, "The world was ill at ease. Socially and morally as well as culturally, America suddenly seemed a frightening and foreign place." (Mattison 68). In 1965, Hartigan was named director of the Hoffberger School of Painting, a graduate painting program at Maryland Institute College of Art, where she began teaching part-time in 1964 and continued until her death.

More jovial paintings of the '60s included Reisterstown Mall (1965) and Modern Cycle (1967), in which she continued to draw from popular culture, but retained her expressive hand.

When the Raven was White (1969), Hartigan's first memorial painting since Frank O'Hara (1966), foreshadowed future paintings of the 1970s. A memorial to her friend Martha Jackson, the work was also autobiographical. The painting represented hope amidst dark times, that there was a time before "the raven turned black". Concurrently, Hartigan was experiencing trauma in her own life - alcoholism, attempted suicide and the mental and physical decline of her husband.

1970s
The 1970s marked a time of autobiographically laden imagery in Hartigan's artwork. She had been influenced by the Cubists since her early education, and the paintings of the '70s heavily reflected that interest. The paintings had crowded compositions, with shallow space, and collections of recognizable subjects. During this decade, Philip Guston became Hartigan's closest artist friend. Their imagery had in common that icons in the work were representations of their respective thoughts and feelings.

Harold Rosenberg, an art critic with whom Hartigan had corresponded with since her split with Greenberg in the 1950s, continued to be a part of Hartigan's life in the 1970s. He argued that "the enemy of art is conformity, not just to the values of values of a totalitarian state or to a society of mass consumption, but to one's own established style.

Beware of Gifts (1971), Another Birthday (1971), Summer to Fall (1971-72), Black Velvet (1972), Autumn Shop Window (1972), Purple Passion (1973), Coloring Book of Ancient Egypt (1973), I Remember Lascaux (1978)and Twilight of the Gods (1978) were all painted during this period.

Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

1980s and 1990s
In the 1980s, Hartigan returned to some of the figurative imagery that was a part of her work early on in her career. Paper dolls, saints, martyrs, opera singers, and queens were subjects in some of these paintings of the 1980s. During this time she also experimented with various painting tools (sticks, wool mitts, rags), which she had done in the 1950s. Hartigan was struggling with alcoholism, and each day, trying to abstain, put much vigor into her arts practice.

In 1992, she was given a solo exhibition at ACA Galleries in New York City. In 1993, Hartigan's work was included in the "Hand-Painted Pop" exhibition at the Whitney Museum.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2025