Grace Hartigan

Grace Hartigan (March 28, 1922 – November 15, 2008) 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.
Early life.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, of Irish-English descent, Hartigan was the oldest of four children. Encouraging her romantic fantasies, her father and grandmother often sang songs and told her stories. Her mother, however, disapproved. At nineteen she was married to Robert Jachens. A planned move to Alaska, where the young couple planned to live as pioneers, ended in California, where Hartigan began painting with her husband's encouragement. After her husband was drafted in 1942, Hartigan returned to New Jersey to study mechanical drafting at the Newark College of Engineering. She also worked as a draftsman in an airplane factory to support herself and her son. During this time, she studied painting with Isaac Lane Muse. Through him, she was introduced to the work of Henri Matisse and Kimon Nicolaïdes’s "The Natural Way to Draw", which influenced her later work as a painter.
Hartigan said of her foray into painting, “I didn’t choose painting. It chose me. I didn’t have any talent. I just had genius.”
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.
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 at Maryland Institute College of Art, a graduate painting program where she taught 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. Having been influenced by the Cubists since her early education, 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.
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. 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.
Themes.
In the early 1950s Hartigan began painting figuratively from the "old masters." Clement Greenberg, an influential art critic in New York during the mid 20th century, enthusiastically supported Hartigan's Abstract Expressionist works, but opposed her painting figuratively. This discord resulted in her break from Greenberg. Painting from the old masters fostered Hartigan's growth in depicting space, light, form, and structure. Some examples of these paintings are Hartigan's "River Bathers (1953)", "Knight, Death, and Devil (1952)", and "The Tribute Money" "(after Rubens)" (1952), working after Matisse, Durer, and Rubens, respectively.
Shop windows and their displays were a recurring theme in her work. Her series "Brides" was begun in 1949, when Hartigan rented a studio at 25 Essex St in lower Manhattan. Inspired by the display windows of the numerous bridal shops concentrated on nearby Grand street, Hartigan (with two unsuccessful marriages behind her) began to paint groups of mannequins dressed in bridal gowns. "Grand Street Brides" (1954), based on Goya's "Carlos IV of Spain and His Family" (1800), was one of several works that drew the attention of critics and collectors and established her reputation. Later in her career, Hartigan said, "[The] bridal theme is one of my empty ritual ideas ... it just seems ludicrous to me to go through all that fuss." Additionally, she stated, "I paint things that I'm against to try to make them wonderful ... very often." In 1965 Hartigan returned to her lifetime fascination with shop windows with an updated, modern vision entitled "Reisterstown Mall." In this painting she began working her way back to more recognizable imagery, though keeping the objects floating in an abstract, buoyant, circular composition. Though she includes a plethora of recognizable objects, this is not Pop Art. Grace was "always too passionately involved with her subject matter to accept the deadpan perspective of Pop."
Hartigan's work often explores, reflects, and incorporates elements of popular culture. For example, in 1962 Hartigan painted an image of Marilyn Monroe. Her painterly, expressive treatment of the subject differs from the impersonal manner of such pop artists as Andy Warhol. Working from several photographs, Hartigan felt that her fragmented, semi-abstract picture represented Monroe more honestly than her glamorous, public image. "Modern Cycle" (1967) captures the American fascination and worship of machines in the 1960s.
Hartigan frequently collaborated with or was influenced by her New York School colleagues, including poets, writers, and fellow artists. The series "Oranges" was a collaborative project with close friend Frank O'Hara, begun in 1952. O'Hara had written a collection of fourteen poems while a student at Harvard. Hartigan created a painting in response to each of the fourteen poems, incorporating text from each poem into the image.
There is a strong autobiographical element present in all of Hartigan's work, but it took on a more central role in the 1970s. Over the course of her career, Hartigan painted numerous memorial pieces, abstract compositions commemorating the deaths of friends and family members including Martha Jackson, Franz Kline, Frank O'Hara, her father, and Winston Price.
Personal life.
Hartigan married Robert Jachens in 1941 and had one son, born 1942. They were divorced in 1947. Artist Harry Jackson was Hartigan's second husband. They married in 1949, but the marriage was annulled in 1950. Hartigan married Long Island gallery owner Robert Keene in 1958; they were divorced in 1960.
In 1959, Hartigan met Dr. Winston Price, a research scientist at Johns Hopkins University, whom she married in 1960. Price died after a decade long mental and physical decline in 1981, caused by injecting himself with an experimental vaccine against encephalitis that left him with spinal meningitis.
Hartigan had a close friendship with Frank O'Hara. They had a falling out and did not speak for six years, but eventually reconnected, and were friends until O’Hara's death in 1966. Philip Guston was the artist Hartigan was closest to in the 1970s.
Hartigan died in November 2008 at age 86 of liver failure.