#art, Grace Hartigan

Grace Hartigan was an abstract expressionist painter of the so-called «School of New York». She was born in 1922 in the beautiful city (that I know quite well) of Newark, New Jersey. She hung out with all the artists, poets, writers of the time and of New York. Her good friends were Jackson Pollock, and Helen Frankenthaler. But she also frequented with Willem y Elaine de Kooning, as well as with others. Actually she was the only female artist to be part of the legendary exhibition «The New American Painting» that toured Europe in the 1950’s.

And I know you will ask me, what the hell is ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM? And I will tell you that it was a movement in painting that developed within the vanguard movement which was ABSTRACT ART. It was first called abstract expressionism in Germany (1919) when the magazine Der Sturm published an article about German Expressionism. In the US it was Alfred Barr (the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, the MoMA in Manhattan) that first used the term (1929) to classify Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings.

Abstract expressionists usually work with large canvasses. Their work is abstract, yet at times there can be traces of figuration. But it’s most important characteristic is what they call the «all over» effect, meaning that they cover every single centimetre of the canvas. The colours are few, mostly whites and blacks or primary colours like yellow, magenta and cyan. Some painters used only one colour, possibly anticipating minimalism. The paintings are done with violent brush-strokes without caring about the superiority of a horizontal or a vertical composition. Philosophically and psychologically, the artist tries to reproduce the anguish, conflict and strife that he feels exists and which he imagines surges from within society. Imagine that…

So to get to know Grace Hartigan a little better, I will tell you that she got married at the age of 19. In 1942 her husband was drafted to fight in WWII. She studied mechanical drafting and became a draftsman in an airplane factory. Later Hartigan studied painting with Isaac Lane Muse (American artist) with whom she got to know the work of Henri Matisse. Studying Kimon Nicolaïdes’s «The Natural Way to Draw» influenced her work as a painter.

Hartigan, who had struggled with alcoholism for many years, died at the age of 86 from liver failure in 2008.

Now for a look at some of her paintings…

CHEERS