Grace Hartigan

Grace Hartigan
File:Portrait of Grace Hartigan in Life Magazine, May 13, 1957.jpg "Most celebrated of the young American women painters, Grace Hartigan, who comes from Newark, N.J., has developed a brilliantly bold, semi-abstract style to capture the garish jumble of excitement of the market district of New York's lower East Side where she lives." LIFE Magazine, May 13, 1957
Born	(1922-03-28)March 28, 1922 Newark, N.J.
Died	Baltimore, M.D.
Nationality	American
Known for	Painting
Movement	Abstract Expressionism

Grace Hartigan (March 28, 1922 – November 15, 2008) was an American Abstract Expressionist painter of the New York School in the 1950s.

Early Years

Born in Newark, New Jersey, of Irish English descent, Grace Hartigan was the oldest of four children. Although she was not raised in the art world, her father and grandmother often sang songs and told her stories, encouraging her romantic fantasies. Her mother, however, disagreed with the support of her free-spirit approach to life, leaving Hartigan feeling alienated. At seventeen she was married to Robert Jachens. When her husband was drafted in 1942, Hartigan attended the Newark College of Engineering, studying mechanical drafting. She also worked as a draftsman in an airplane factory to support herself and her son. During this time in the forties, she studied painting with Isaac Lane Muse. Through him, she was introduced to Henri Matisse and Kimon Nicolaïdes’s The Natural Way to Draw, which influenced her later work as a painter.

Early career

After studying with Muse, Grace Hartigan and her husband attempted to move to Alaska to pioneer, though they only made it to California, where Hartigan started painting. In 1945 she made the move from California to New York City, where she was a lively participant in the vibrant artistic and literary milieu of the times. Her friends included Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Frank O'Hara, Knox Martin, and many other painters, artists, poets, and writers. 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 '50s. She was often thought of as a “second generation Abstract Expressionist”, being heavily influenced by her colleagues of the time. Though she built her early career upon more of a complete abstraction, in the early fifties Hartigan began to incorporate more recognizable motifs and characters into her paintings. In the early fifties, she actually exhibited for a time under the name George Hartigan in order to try to achieve better recognition for her work.

Themes/Series

Paintings from the Old Masters: In the early 1950s Grace Hartigan began painting figuratively from old master paintings. 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 Bather s (1953), Knight, Death, and Devil (1952), and The Tribute Money (after Rubens)(1952)-working after Matisse, Durer, and Rubens, respectively.

Gender

Brides: In 1949, Hartigan rented a studio on the Lower East Side. At that time period, in that area, the idea of marriage was perpetuated in the myriad bridal shops located along Grand Street and arranged marriages that took place in the area. Hartigan herself, by that time, had been in two unsuccessful marriages. Inspired by the bridal display windows, she began to paint collections of bridal figures. In an interview that took place later on 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".

Oranges: In November 1952, Hartigan and close friend Frank O'Hara began a collaborative project: Oranges. Frank O’Hara had written a collection of 14 poems while a student at Harvard . Hartigan made a painting in response to every of the fourteen poems, incorporating text from each of them into every image.

Memorials: During her career, Hartigan painted several memorial paintings, abstractly depicting people with whom she had relationships. These memorial paintings were of Martha Jackson, Franz Kline, Frank O'Hara, her father, and Winston Price.

Popular Culture

Marilyn (1962)- Like other pop artists ofher time, such as Andy Warhol, Hartigan painted a portrait of the iconicactress Marilyn Monroe. Her painting differs from other similar works of thattime, particularly due to her treatment. She uses bold brushwork, in addition to stippling and heavy, dark lines that give a sense of the artist in the act of painting. She worked from several photographs to create a sort of abstract painted collage whose disjointed quality was for Hartigan closer to the "real" Marilyn,than it was to the glossy facade she presented to the public that was the focus for Warhol and other Pop artists.

Reisterstown Mall (1965)- Grace returned to her lifetime fascination with shop windows with an updated, modern vision. 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.”

Modern Cycle (1967)- This painting captures the American fascination and worship of machines in the 1960s. It was this spirit that Hartigan parodied in Modern Cycle, a humor that recurs frequently in her work.

Autobiography: Autobiography is present in all of Grace Hartigan’s work, but it took on a more central role in the 1970s.

Late career

Late 1950s/1960s

In 1959, Hartigan met and promptly married Dr. Winston Price. Hartigan then moved to Baltimore to be with him. Her work around this time shifted; she began making 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. Said Hartigan, “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 MICA, a graduate painting program that was created around her.

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, Dr. Price.

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 (Mattison 88).

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.

Personally, Hartigan was dealing with the declining health of her husband, Dr. Winston Price. He had been searching to find a vaccine to cure encephalitis and had tested the vaccine on himself with disastrous results. Immediately, he experienced intense depression, was hospitalized, and experienced mental and physical decline until his death in 1981.

1980s

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 really struggling with alcoholism and each day, trying to abstain, put much vigor into her arts practice. She worked serially with subject matter.

Personal life

Grace Hartigan married Robert Jachens out of high school. They went their separate ways after Jachens came back from fighting in WWII.

Harry Jackson was Grace Hartigan’s second husband. Pollock, San Miguel de Allende 1949

In 1959, Hartigan met Wilson Price, whom she soon after married. Hartigan divorced Harry Jackson so she could be with Price. Price died after a decade long mental and physical decline in 1981.

Hartigan had a close friendship with Frank O’Hara. They had a falling out and did not speak for six years during the course of their friendship, but then reconnected until O’Hara’s death in 1966.

Philip Guston was the artist Hartigan was closest to in the 1970s.

Grace Hartigan died in November 2008.

Bibliography

• Hirsh, Sharon L., Grace Hartigan: Painting Art History. Carlisle, PA: The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, 2003.
• LaMoy, William and Joseph McCaffrey (Eds.), The Journals of Grace Hartigan. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009, [1]
• Mattison, Robert S., Grace Hartigan: A Painter's World. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990.
• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4. p. 162-165
• Marika Herskovic, New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists, (New York School Press, 2000.) ISBN 0-9677994-0-6. p. 16; p. 37; p. 174-177
• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract and Figurative Expressionism Style Is Timely Art Is Timeless An Illustrated Survey With Artists' Statements, Artwork and Biographies. (New York School Press, 2009.) ISBN 978-0-9677994-2-1. p. 116-119

External links

• New York Times Obituary(subscription required)
• Guardian obituary
• Telegraph obituary
• Grace Hartigan Papers at Syracuse University Special Collections Research Center