Restless Ambition
Grace Hartigan, Painter
-
- $69.99
-
- $69.99
Publisher Description
This first-ever biography of American painter Grace Hartigan traces her rise from virtually self-taught painter to art-world fame, her plunge into obscurity after leaving New York to marry a scientist in Baltimore, and her constant efforts to reinvent her style and subject matter. Along the way, there were multiple affairs, four troubled marriages, a long battle with alcoholism, and a chilly relationship with her only child.
Attempting to channel her vague ambitions after an early marriage, Grace struggled to master the basics of drawing in night-school classes. She moved to New York in her early twenties and befriended Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and other artists who were pioneering Abstract Expressionism. Although praised for the coloristic brio of her abstract paintings, she began working figuratively, a move that was much criticized but ultimately vindicated when the Museum of Modern Art purchased her painting The Persian Jacket in 1953. By the mid-fifties, she freely combined abstract and representational elements. Grace-who signed her paintings "Hartigan"- was a full-fledged member of the "men's club" that was the 1950s art scene. Featured in Time, Newsweek, Life, and Look, she was the only woman in MoMA's groundbreaking 12 Americans exhibition in 1956, and the youngest artist-and again, only woman-in The New American Painting, which toured Europe in 1958-1959. Two years later she moved to Baltimore, where she became legendary for her signature tough-love counsel to her art school students. Grace continued to paint throughout her life, seeking-for better or worse-something truer and fiercer than beauty.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This spirited biography is the first to chart the career of Abstract Expressionist Hartigan (1922 2008), a painter with as much swagger as any of her male peers, who was the only female artist included in many important midcentury exhibitions, such as the Museum of Modern Art's The New American Painting, which toured Europe in the late 1950s. Curtis, a former writer for the Los Angeles Times, describes a young Hartigan spying on Gypsy caravans in Millburn, N.J., and tolerating a psychologically abusive mother. When Hartigan moved to New York City, it was like "running off with the gypsies." There she formed key relationships with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Frank O'Hara, and the other artist-patrons of Greenwich Village's fabled Cedar Tavern. Confident and strong willed, but privately full of doubts, Hartigan "always had to be the star of her personal show," which complicated her love life with middling male artists but it also pushed her painting into new territory. She made brave forays into figurative painting and was later recognized as a Pop Art precursor. Ultimately Curtis's biography holds no big surprises. Devoting about half the book to the '50s, she divides Hartigan's career between the New York years and after, when Hartigan married a medical scientist, relocated to Baltimore, Md., and began teaching at the Maryland Institute College of Art, all while the quality of her work declined. Grappling with alcoholism later in life, the final chapters inevitably read like the hard comedown from a great high. Overall, an accessible portrait of a gutsy AbEx figure.