Grace Hartigan

Grace Hartigan, born in 1922, American abstract expressionist painter (see abstract expressionism), whose work since 1952 has included human figures and landscape elements. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Hartigan had very little formal art training but absorbed many lessons from the New York City artistic community in which she lived beginning in 1945. By 1948 Hartigan's work was strongly influenced by the so-called drip paintings of American artist Jackson Pollock and the expressive, brushed style of Dutch-born American painter Willem de Kooning. By the early 1950s her work was being grouped with a younger generation of abstract expressionist artists, including Americans Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Larry Rivers, and Alfred Leslie. She exhibited these early works under the name of George Hartigan, in tribute to George Sand and George Eliot, two female writers of the 19th century who had used this first name in order to work in a male-dominated world.

In 1952, inspired by her study of such earlier painters as Henri Matisse of France, Francisco de Goya and Diego Velázquez of Spain, and Albrecht Dürer of Germany, Hartigan abandoned her previously abstract style, incorporating human figures into her paintings. In the large canvas Grand Street Brides (1954, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City), inspired by the store-window displays of bridal shops in her neighborhood, Hartigan invented a technique of repeatedly wiping and scraping down the canvas, creating a surface composed of complex layers.

Over the years, Hartigan continued to investigate new painting techniques as well as ancient art styles. I Remember Lascaux (1978, private collection, Pennsylvania) utilizes thin washes of paint and is inspired by prehistoric cave paintings in Lascaux, France. In 1983 Hartigan created the series Great Queens and Empresses, in which recognizable female historical figures are rendered with sharp outlines and intense colors.