Grace Hartigan was born on March 28, 1922 and grew up with a feeling of creative expectation—something she would later describe as more genius than talent. Her family lived in a then-rural area of New Jersey and one of Hartigan’s fondest memories was watching groups of brightly-dressed traveling gypsies in the woods, sitting around campfires and telling fortunes "just like [in] romantic movies and stories."
College was financially impossible so Hartigan married instead; she took art classes in the evenings yet found herself pregnant not too long after. While her initial coursework was stressful and she felt greatly lacking in ability, Hartigan continued to learn to draw throughout her pregnancy and following the birth of her son, Jeffrey.
The New York Scene
With the coming of World War II, Hartigan worked as a draftswoman in an airplane factory while her husband was in the army. She then began taking lessons from avant-garde teacher and artist Isaac Lane Muse, who helped Hartigan to free herself from her preoccupation with technical skill and focus more on personal style and creativity.
At this juncture, Hartigan knew that she wanted to fully pursue an artistic career but felt that in doing so, her son would not have a very stable upbringing. Grace and her husband had parted ways by now, yet she yielded custody of Jeffrey to his grandparents and ultimately his father. She had moved to New York and begun to involve herself within the contemporary art scene, and in 1948 Hartigan thumbed a ride out to Jackson Pollock’s Long Island studio to take a look at his groundbreaking abstract expressions. She was intensely moved by what she saw and became friends with Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner.
Some of Hartigan’s other significant acquaintances were painters Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, along with poet Frank O’Hara, the latter offering new vistas to Hartigan in terms of how to use diverse creative influences. As Hartigan herself noted, her ultimate goal was to integrate all that was “vulgar and vital in American life” into her artwork. She did feel like something of an arriviste, however, and spent a concentrated period of time studying and copying such Old Masters as Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya. A fusion of her own modern perspective along with Goya’s Royal Family (Charles IV and His Family) resulted in the 1954 Grand Street Brides, featuring a curiously regal arrangement of wedding-gowned mannequins in a lower Manhattan shop window.
Success and Baltimore
The 1950s was a key decade for Hartigan as she established an artistic reputation and had her first solo show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. She was included in various other significant exhibits and featured in a 1958 Life magazine article on American painters, and her work Persian Jacket was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art. Following two more fleeting marriages, Hartigan found her fourth and final husband in Winston Price, a Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist and art collector.
On the positive side, the relationship with Price was free of the creative rivalry Hartigan had experienced with other romantic partners, while on the downside, her new husband’s work required that he and Grace live in Baltimore. Though she had initially wanted to move away from New York’s changing aesthetic climate, Hartigan felt isolated in Maryland, far removed from wild conversations at Greenwich Village’s Cedar Tavern and the general camaraderie of fellow artists.
Hartigan began a celebrated teaching career in Baltimore, however, and found a social and instructive outlet in arts education. She also met Maryland-based Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still, who advised Hartigan that she was better than "most of those boys"—or the other male painters she knew.
Later Years and Legacy
In 1969, Hartigan’s husband suffered a terrible tragedy in the name of science by injecting himself with what he had hoped was an encephalitic vaccine. He contracted spinal meningitis as a side effect and died in a gradual and painful manner in 1982.
The experience was overwhelming for Hartigan, who went through her own issues with alcoholism and even attempted suicide during her husband’s illness. Nonetheless, Hartigan overcame her drinking problem and began creating again, and she continued to teach at Baltimore’s Hoffberger School of Painting until only a year before her death at age 86 on November 15, 2008.
Sources
- Oral History Interview with Grace Hartigan -- Smithsonian Archives of American Art
- Grace Hartigan Obituary -- The Guardian UK
- American Women Artists -- Charlotte Streifer Rubenstein (Avon Books, 1982)
