Grace Hartigan

Inspired by Jackson Pollock's allover gestural style and all-encompassing scale and Willem De Kooning's devotion to art history, Grace Hartigan began her career as an Abstract Expressionist in 1950’s inserting recognizable imagery into her abstractions, which often consisted of fairly dense networks of geometric shapes. In 1952, she spent a year making studies based on Old Master paintings, resulting in a temporary rift from many of her Abstract Expressionist friends, such as Joan Mitchell, and the loss of support from critic Clement Greenberg, who had featured her in New Talent, co-curated with art historian Meyer Schapiro for the Kootz Gallery, New York, in 1950. But Hartigan's paintings were included at the Museum of Modern Art: in 12 Americans (1956) and The New American Painting (1958). As one of few women painters to receive that level of exposure, Hartigan garnered significant press coverage and was featured in Life magazine in 1957 and Newsweek in 1959.

Toward the end of the 1950s, Hartigan experimented with a freer gestural technique. Though she fiercely opposed Pop art, which emerged at this time, some Pop elements are present in her landmark painting Marilyn (1962), a pastiche of the film star Marilyn Monroe, which scatters facial features such as full lips and sparkling teeth across the canvas. Hartigan continued to refer to Old Masters such as El Greco and Jean-Baptiste Greuze and to experiment with balancing figuration and abstraction, but her later work, from the 1980s through the 2000s, tended toward the representational.

Hartigan's work was featured in solo exhibitions at Baltimore Museum of Art, Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, and Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase. Her work was included in major group exhibitions at the Jewish Museum in New York, Documenta in Kassel, Guggenheim Museum in New York, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Courtesy of the Guggenheim