Second-Sex Abstract Expressionist
Grace Hartigan
“Now as before it is the vulgar and the vital and the possibility of its transformation into the beautiful which continues to challenge and fascinate me. Or perhaps the subject of my art is like the definition of humor emotional pain remembered in tranquility.” — Grace Hartigan
Recognised as one of the most celebrated female artists of her time, Grace Hartigan (1922-2008) was a household name in post-war American art. In 1953 the curator and art historian Alfred H. Barr (1902-1981) walked out of New York’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery (a spot known as a salon of sorts for the New York School) with one of her paintings under his arm and put it straight into the permanent collection of MoMA. His actions thus solidified her position within the canon of modern art and in 1958 LIFE magazine pronounced her “the most celebrated of the young American women painters”. Hartigan was the only female artist to appear in both the MoMA’s seminal 1956 show, 12 Americans alongside Sam Francis (1923-1994), Philip Guston (1913-1980) and Franz Kline (1910-1962) and The New American Painting (which was co-organized by MoMA and the United States Information Agency), that toured Europe from 1958-1959 with the purpose of introducing abstract expressionism abroad. This was perhaps all the more remarkable at a time when the art world was so gendered and polarising; throughout the 1950s Hartigan and other women artists of the time felt resistance from the art establishment — modernism, and in particular Abstract Expressionism with its emphasis on “action painting”, was seen largely as a male preserve, as epitomized by the hard living enfant terrible of the American art scene Jackson Pollock (1912-1956). Indeed early on in her career Hartigan would sign many of her paintings using the pseudonym “George” — an homage to two female writers she admired, Mary Ann Evans, who went by the pen name George Eliot (1819-1880) and Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, who used the pen name George Sand (1804-1976) — which some critics have suggested was a reflection of the fact that she wasn’t taken seriously by the New York school. Hartigan would however deny this, and more likely it was a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the dynamics of institutional relations in a male dominated art world. Though filled with raw gestural marks, her canvases both assumed and challenged the non-objective style of her forebears, like de Kooning and Pollock, masterfully interweaving abstraction and figuration. Often, they were imbued with social commentary that questioned the traditional role of women, for e.g. a 1957 series Grand Street Brides examined the construct of marriage by abstracting bridal shop mannequins.
Grace Hartigan in her studio, 1957
Detail of an abstract work by Grace Hartigan
A firm fixture in the post-war New York artistic scene, and a regular at the Cedar Tavern (a booze-fuelled Abstract Expressionist think tank), Hartigan was a close associate and collaborator with the poet Frank O’Hara (1926-1966), as well as a friend to Milton Avery (1885-1965), Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970). However, it wasn’t until 1948 after seeing a Pollock exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery that Hartigan began to form her own, inimitable Abstract Expressionist sensibility: “you’ve no idea what it is to see something that’s in the world for the first time. I was just stunned.” The artist was undoubtedly influenced by Pollock’s all-over gestural style and all-encompassing scale and de Kooning’s devotion to art history, as were many young artists, but from the very start she had something of a singular vision, which helped her to beat her own path through the rigid hierarchical structures of Modern art in the post-war era. Combining aspects of abstraction and figuration, in 1952 she followed de Kooning’s lead and began studying Old Master painters — including Diego Velásquez (1599-1660), Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) — and rejecting theoretical divisions between representation and abstraction. Hartigan’s River Bathers (1953), Knight, Death, and Devil (1952), and The Tribute Money (1952), were after Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), and Rubens, respectively. Perhaps somewhat inexplicably in today’s world when experimentation is positively encouraged, Hartigan was castigated by many of her Abstract Expressionist friends, such as Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), for abandoning pure abstraction — which was seen by her contemporaries as the highest form of art — and lost the support of influential critic Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) (who in 1950 had featured her in New Talent, co-curated with art historian Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996) for the Kootz Gallery, New York). Entirely undeterred, Hartigan played to the beat of her own drum, and of her approach she declared: “No rules … I must be free to paint anything I feel.” To an extent therefore these works can be seen as highly rebellious — in that Hartigan was questioning the status quo. She was, undisputedly a pioneer and in the mid-1950’s began her City Life series, for which she worked from images on the Lower East Side: “I have found my subject,” Hartigan said in 1957. “It concerns that which is vulgar and vital in American life, and possibilities of its transcendence into the beautiful.”
“Marilyn” (1962) by Grace Hartigan
Perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, after marrying epidemiologist and collector Winston Price in 1960, Hartigan left New York to live with him in his home town of Baltimore. “It removed her from the public eye,” explains Caitlin Foreht, Specialist in Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s, “but it was also the push and pull of fame and creativity. There was such an upward momentum when she was young, and then she went her own way.” As it would transpire, Price’s emotional and intellectual support had a tremendous impact on her work, and the slashing, wet and dry brushstrokes of her earlier years made way for a series of lyrical, more intensely coloured canvases in the 1960s, for e.g. No Man Is an Island (1959–60), Phoenix (1962) and Lily Pond (1962), are all reflective of Hartigan’s new-found security and happiness. In 1962 the artist turned from what Robert Mattison in his book Grace Hartigan: A Painter’s World refers to as “a lyrical state” to undertake a personal and psychological study of Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962); a haunting abstraction that she simply called Marilyn (1962). Inspired by a series of photographs and Monroe’s comment “Fame may go by — and, so long I’ve had you,” the actresses facial features appear dotted across the canvas — her gleaming white teeth in an open-mouthed smile (from a LIFE magazine photograph), a wavy blonde lock of hair, a blue eye, white klieg lights, and a gesturing hand emerging from a ruffled sleeve (based on a photograph of a detail from a fifteenth century fresco).
The painting is a reflection not only of Monroe’s inability to cope with the innumerable pitfalls of fame, but also Hartgan’s own feelings about the decline of her own celebrity and what she later recalled as “an isolated creative life” (almost certainly, by this stage of her career she was no longer a household name). Yet, despite her detachment and isolation from the New York artic community, Hartigan still had a finger firmly on the zeitgeist, and would go on to paint Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) (because of her defiance of Nazism) and Zarah Leander (1907-1981), using the female form as a vehicle for a narrative, marking a shift in her work toward more anxiety-laden imagery. The Hunted (1963), Human Fragment (1963), and Mistral (1964), all embody the Hartigan’s reaction to a world exploding in crisis — the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy (1917-1963). “The world was ill at ease,” Hartigan recalled. “Socially and morally as well as culturally, America suddenly seemed a frightening and foreign place.” When the Raven was White (1969) was a harbinger of the work that would follow; a memorial to her friend Martha Jackson, it was also in part self-analytical, representing hope amidst darkness, that there was a time before “the raven turned black”. Concurrently, Hartigan was experiencing significant trauma in her own life — the loss of her father, alcoholism and depression, attempted suicide and the mental and physical decline of her husband. Amid her personal upheavals, painting became a lifeline. Having been influenced by the Cubists since her early education, the autobiographically-laden paintings of the 1970s heavily reflected that interest.
“City Life” (1956) by Grace Hartigan
In the years since her death in 2008, Hartigan’s work has once again come to the fore, in part as a result of curators, scholars and collectors re-evaluating the canon of Western art and shining a light on those who may not have been given their rightful dues; finally Hartigan is being acknowledged as an important figure in twentieth century art, rather than brushed aside as merely a “second generation abstract-expressionist” — a somewhat derogatory descriptor suggesting that, as wonderful as her work may be, she would never be top of the heap, like her male-contemporaries Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning et al (for all intents and purposes, one may as well simply use the expression: “second-sex abstract expressionist”). Hartigan was a painter who refused to be defined by labels or styles — and in a generation and artistic era defined in narrow, patriarchal terms, she made the nonfigurative language of abstract expressionism her own. Hartigan was able to embrace and contribute to the evolution of the movement, while also maintaining a sense of what distinguished her oeuvre, ultimately positioning it to remain relevant in the latter decades of the twentieth century — and paving the way for the New Figuration and Neo-Expressionist artists of the 1970s and 1980s. “She simply dismissed the vicissitudes of the art market,” explains Critic and art historian Irving Sandler (1925-2018). “The succession of new trends in the art world. This didn’t in any real or important way affect her. Grace is the real thing.” Somewhat paradoxically Hartigan’s use of commercial imagery led her to be included in the 1993 exhibition Hand-Painted Pop at the Whitney Museum, despite her public and vocal loathing for the movement. “Pop Art is not painting because painting must have content and emotion,” she said in the 1960’s. On the other hand, she reflected at the time of the Whitney show, “I’d much rather be a pioneer of a movement that I hate than the second generation of a movement that I love.” A statement which perhaps perfectly illustrates how far the art world has come, and how far it still has to go.