|
Vision of Heaven and Hell, by Grace Hartigan, 1985. Oil on canvas. 9' X 16'. C. Grimaldis Gallery.
Copyright
Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe, by Grace Hartigan, 1992. Oil on canvas. 78" X 94". C. Grimaldis Gallery.
Copyright
Caribbean Interior, by Grace Hartigan, 2003. Oil on linen. 72" X 78".
Copyright
|
 |
Medium/Discipline: Painting, Works on Paper
Birthplace: Newark, NJ
Maryland Affiliation: Active while in residence
Prominent Theme: Figurative; Abstract
Style/Period: Abstract Expressionism
Gender: Female
Race/Ethnicity: White
Biography: One of the first young artists to aspire to Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s and 50s and one of only a few women artists to participate in the movement, Grace Hartigan adopted the commitment of her friends Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock to the art-making process. She has served as Director of the Maryland Institute College of Art Hoffberger School of Painting since its inception in 1965, five years after she moved to Baltimore. Her vibrant artistic vision has continued throughout her long life and career, with her work transitioning from pure abstraction, often inspired by poetry or music, to Pop Art, and to a figurative, expressionistic style inspired by art history from the ancient to the Modern periods.
Hartigan was trained in mechanical engineering draftsmanship. Her pursuit of art-making was inspired initially by the work of Matisse and encouraged by her associations with artists, writers, dramatists and musicians in New York City in the 1940s. Hartigan's first mentor was Isaac Lane Muse, who introduced her to an artistic manual that included methods for "gesture drawing." She lived with Muse and convened weekly sketching sessions, which connected her with some of the most important artists in American art history that would remain lifelong friends and artistic allies: Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko. In January 1948, Hartigan saw Jackson Pollock's first show of monumental scale drip paintings; she understood immediately their importance. Hartigan parted ways with Muse shortly thereafter when he encouraged her not to paint abstractly.
A trip to Mexico for most of 1949 and enrollment in San Miguel de Allende art school allowed Hartigan to devote herself full time to painting for the first time. Scholar Robert Mattison relates Hartigan's work in Mexico to Rothko's late Surrealist work. Mexican folk art and the hot colors of Mexico inspired the work, as did the biomorphic imagery of Miró and Gorky. After returning to New York in 1950, she produced Months and Moons, which is perhaps the first to become independent, yet reminiscent, of her influences. Mattison writes that, "The most important contemporary influence for Hartigan's interest in figurative art was de Kooning's Woman paintings," while at the same time moving independently "toward a reassessment of past art." (Mattison, p. 21) It was de Kooning's art that eventually "provided a model for Hartigan of freely expressive but masterly painting technique" and that was inspiring for its rejection of "the theoretical division between representation and abstractive." (p. 13)
Several avant garde art shows that included work by Hartigan and others culminated in the "New Talent" show in 1950, curated by Clement Greenberg, Abstract Expressionist art critic and Meyer Schapiro, professor of art history at Columbia University. More importantly, she was given her first solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy, a new gallery run by John Bernard Myers. Her work was critically received but the show was not widely attended. Her second solo show was held in 1952, also at Tibor de Nagy. Throughout 1952, Hartigan turned away from abstraction and focused on Old Master painting studies: "The notion of both continuation and invention, tradition and newness, has remained essential to Hartigan." (p. 21) She began to reinterpret Old Master paintings and prints of the Renaissance, Baroque, 17th Century Spain and Modern periods, including work by Dürer, Rubens, Tiepolo, Francisco de Zurbarán and Matisse, that dealt with mystical, Christian themes as well as a fascination with costume and how it reveals the inner self. In 1953, Alfred J. Barr, Jr., founding director of the Museum of Modern Art purchased Hartigan's painting Persian Jacket (1952), which typified her ability to mix the traditional and the modern; she incorporated the mood of Spanish paintings by Velázquez portraits and Goya's etchings into this work. Despite such sales and successes, she continued to struggle financially. In 1952-1953, Hartigan also began to integrate text into her compositions from Frank O'Hara's poems, which were nonlinear and essentially modern in approach and suited Hartigan's sensibilities; the painter and poet collaborated on a series of paintings. Hartigan traveled to Europe in 1958 and created abstract canvases of Dublin and Sweden, and in 1959 she created other Place paintings based on Kansas, the birthplace of one of her friends, and of Saint Croix.
Hartigan's fame reached its peak in the late 1950's. During this time, Hartigan was featured in a Life photographic essay "Women Artists in Ascendance" and her work included in several prestigious exhibitions such as Twelve Americans and the Sao Paolo Bienal. In 1959, after the tumult of fame subsided, Hartigan married an Abstract Expressionist collector from Baltimore and epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Winston Price. After her move to Baltimore, embarked on work that incorporated biomorphic forms, intense pure color and her signature use of black line. In the early 1960s, she invented a new medium, watercolor collage but using washes to create form and then tearing and reassembling the pieces. She opposed Pop art for its lack of "content and emotion," and responded in her art to the civil rights and women's rights movement. In her Calvert Street studio in Baltimore, she produced work such as Reisterstown Mall (1965). She also approached the Maryland Institute College of Art president and inquired as to whether there was an interest in her teaching graduate students there. She continues to teach at the Hoffberger School of Painting, and serves as its director.
Interactions with students led to a fresh crop of subject matter for Hartigan based on humor and irony, such as "Modern Cycle" during a time when the machines were celebrated. Hartigan suffered many emotional hardships and losses during the 1970s, and her work reflected these through personal symbolism in a less abstract style than most of her prior work. Her artmaking continued with new ideas and images the result by her exploration of the urban Baltimore communities, such as Fells Point and its ethnic neighborhoods. Hartigan's compositions began to incorporate elements of ancient and modern works she came into contact with in museums, such as classical Greek pottery or the Lascaux cave paintings, and reference to objects encountered in her urban experiences, such as items in shop windows.
During the 1980s, Hartigan created a series of Paper Dolls based on Glamourous Movie Stars of the Thirties (1978, by Tom Tierney), that in a monumental figurative style from her approach to the medium of paint: figures of woman float on the surface of the canvas, with the figures hidden by rivulets of paint. Her wash technique was perfected in this decade in works such as Eastern Avenue Florist of 1982. Hartigan's focus on heroines as subject continued throughout the 1980s to include Great Queens and Heiresses such as Joséphine and Theodora. She also executed paintings after Old Master works, such as Raphael's Saint George and Carvaggio's Bacchus, and adapted Renaissance compositions to new subjects. In the late 1980's, Hartigan embarked on a series referred to as American Places, which Mattison says inspired in Hartigan a desire to document the "glitter and trash" of West Coast Americana in a style much freer and experimental that hearkened to Pollock's methods.
Selected References: Mattison, Robert Saltonstall. Grace Hartigan : A Painter's World. (New York: Hudson Hills Press; Distributed in the U.S. by Rizzoli International Publications), c1990.
Hirsh, Sharon L. Grace Hartigan: Painting Art History. (Carlisle, Pa.: Trout Gallery, Dickinson College; Seattle, Wash. Distributed by the University of Washington Press), c2003.
Other Publications: Grove Dictionary of Art
Hartigan, Grace. Grace Hartigan. (Purchase, N.Y.: Neuberger Museum of Art), c2001.
Munro, Eleanor C. Originals: American Women Artists. (New York: Da Capo Press), 2000.
Puniello, Françoise S and Rusak, Halina R. Abstract Expressionist Women Painters: An Annotated Bibliography: Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Ethel Schwabacher. (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press), c1996.
Hartigan, Grace. Grace Hartigan: Painting the Renaissance. January 4 - January 29, 1986, Gruenebaum Gallery. (New York: The Gallery), 1986.
Single-Artist Exhibitions: Selected exhibitions
Artist Contact Information: Grimaldis Gallery (Baltimore, MD), c.grimaldis@verizon.net, www.cgrimaldisgallery.com, 410-539-1080
Artist Web site:http://www.cgrimaldisgallery.com
|
