restless ambition grace hartigan painter

Three years later, Museum of Modern Art director Alfred Barr acquired one of her paintings for the museum collection. In 1950, the influential art critic Clement Greenberg and well-respected art historian Meyer Schapiro included Hartigan in their New Talent show at the Kootz Gallery in New York City, followed by a solo exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. In an interview with Cindy Nemser, Hartigan denied she took the name to avoid gender discrimination. Hartigan used the pseudonym “George Hartigan” for her first gallery exhibition, because she felt inspired by the female writers George Sand and George Eliot. She developed friendships with Abstract Expressionist painters and poets such as Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Frank O’Hara. In the mid-1940’s she moved back to Newark, where she trained in mechanical drafting. They had hoped to live in Alaska as pioneers, but never made it there. Encouraged by her first husband, she began painting in California where the young couple got stranded on their way to Alaska. However, the paintings in the exhibition demonstrate that their paintings do hold up as great works of art next to the ones of their male peers. They share a common bond in that they were often overlooked and underappreciated by galleries and museums in the male-dominated art world of their time. Hartigan is among a group of twentieth century female artists, including Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, whose works are all on view in the current Van Gogh to Rothko exhibition.

Because she joined the movement later, she is often referred to as a “second-generation” Abstract Expressionist. She was well known for her gestural, intensely colored paintings. March 28 is the birthday of one of Abstract Expressionists’ leading female artists: Grace Hartigan.

Restless ambition grace hartigan painter