Grace Hartigan: Both Abstract and Expressive

"I didn't choose painting.  It chose me." - Grace Hartigan

The Red Bowl is an exuberant gesture surrounded by fluid daubs of paint.  Are there flowers in the bowl? Hard to say for certain.  It is as though there are several different things insisting on their existence, demanding our attention.  Such colorful distortions were a hallmark of Grace Hartigan's work from the beginning. 

Fascinated by Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, Grace Hartigan (1882-2008) was twenty-six when she showed up at Willem de Kooning's Fourth Avenue flat.  De Kooning had emigrated to New York City  from Rotterdam but Hartigan had escaped from Newark, just as surely an epic a journey as far as the she was concerned.  As a child, Hartigan had been fascinated by gypsies, sensing kindred spirits in their seemingly carefree existence.

Until she became an artist, Hartigan was unsure where to focus her abundant energies.  Unable to afford college, Hartigan married at nineteen but marriage could not contain her ambitions and after giving birth to a child, she realized that motherhood would not either.  When her son Jeff was seven years old she took him to live with her parents in New Jersey and went back to New  alone.  "If you look through history at people who are pioneers, they don't have a guilt chip. They're forced to have a guilt chip, and act like they have one, but they don't have one.  ..... I think Grace is one of those people who does what she needs to do."  

Lacking formal art training, Grace devised her own curriculum; she spent the year 1952 painting her way through art history, doing freehand renditions of Rubens, Velaquez, and Goya.  To her friends and fellow painters Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell this was heresy; they thought Hartigan had lost her nerve. 

During the early 1950s Hartigan sometimes exhibited under the name George Hartigan to avoid stereotypical reactions to a woman's work.  Her combination of beauty, talent, ambition, and rambunctiousness led to high visibility (including a feature story in Life magazine) and made her a model for other young women, notably the aspiring art historian Linda Nochlin.  Unlike Nochlin, Hartigan was always hesitant to identify herself as a feminist.  And she disputed other labels applied to - second generation Ab Ex-er and forerunner of Pop Art.  One influence Hartigan was happy to credit was the poetry written by her friend Frank O'Hara, the one who showed her that elements of both "high" and "low" art were compatible.  Clement Greenberg, the most influential art critic in postwar American art and Meyer Schapiro, an art historian, launched Hartigan's career in 1950 when they included her in their show "New Talent."

But Greenberg was incensed when Hartigan began to include realistic elements in her work, rebuking her for losing her way and decreeing that her wok was no longer modern(!).  Later he disparaged the idea that women could be great artists, even to her face.

Throughout a  career marked restlessness and experimentation, the one constant was Hartigan's conviction that making art is making magic.

Image: Grace Hartigan - Red Bowl, 1953, Baltimore Museum of Art.