Grace Hartigan

(United States of America, 28/03/1922 - 15/11/2008)

Born in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in a family that didn’t view her femininity as a limitation, from a young age Hartigan was determined to create greatness and refused to make herself small or compromise on her desires to make that happen.

Throughout WW2, Hartigan worked as a mechanical draftsman in an aerorplane factory while taking night courses at the local engineering college. It was during this time that she first saw a work by Henri Matisse and became hooked, signing up for art classes with Isaac Lane Muse, with whom she later moved to New York City. Soon becoming dissatisfied with his ‘artist’s-wife’ expectations of her and outgrowing his conventional ideals of the avant-garde, she made the same decision so many male artists had made before her – to choose art over all else.

Leaving Muse and sending her son to live with her parents, Hartigan was free to focus entirely on her art. Scandalous at the time, many have since rightly pointed out that when family was sacrificed in the name of a man’s art, it was excused and later incorporated into the great artistic myth of the overwhelming urge to create and doing whatever it takes to make art. But, unlike other artists, she didn’t find her inspiration in museums or galleries – she chose, instead, to roam the streets of New York and find her muse in the people she observed.

Her lack of formal artistic training came to be beneficial as it saved her the trouble of unlearning the rules her fellow artists were trying to break. She, however, didn’t know any of them in the first place. Just five years after moving to New York, she was included in the New Talent exhibition of 1950 before becoming the first Second Generation artist to be given a solo show at the Tibor de Nagy gallery in 1951 and one of just five women included in the groundbreaking Ninth Street Show that same year, solidifying her position as a leading figure in the Second Generation of Abstract Expressionist artists and being identified by Life magazine as the “most celebrated of the young American women painters”.

In 1952, Hartigan was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition 12 Americans, a defining moment that placed her at the forefront of a new generation of painters. Her early Abstractions, while aligned with the explosive energy of her contemporaries, often incorporated hints of representational imagery, suggesting a world just beyond the edge of pure gesture. This interplay between Abstraction and representation would become central to her career and by the mid-1950s, she had embraced more overtly figurative elements, drawing from found images, advertising and urban life, which further set her apart from the increasingly rigid expectations surrounding Abstract Expressionism.

Hartigan’s work of the late 1950s and early 1960s was fuelled by her conviction that painting could be simultaneously modern and grounded in the human experience and her refusal to ever repeat herself. Her evolving practice responded to shifting personal circumstances and to larger cultural changes, including the rise of Pop Art and Minimalism, movements she regarded with skepticism but that further motivated her explorations of Figuration.

In 1965, she accepted a teaching position at the newly formed Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), beginning what would become a four-decade tenure as the programme’s director. Here, she cultivated a rigorous, mentorship-driven environment that emphasised painting as a lifelong pursuit requiring discipline, resilience and passion.

Celebrated as a leading figure among the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, Hartigan balanced Abstraction and Figuration in ways that challenged prevailing formal orthodoxies and asserted her position within a milieu largely dominated by men.

Image: Grace Hartigan, Grand Street Brides (1954). Oil on canvas, 184.3 x 260 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, U.S.A.