Grace Hartigan

Grace Hartigan
"Most celebrated of the young American women painters, Grace Hartigan, who comes from Newark, N.J., has developed a brilliantly bold, semi-abstract style to capture the garish jumble of excitement of the market district of New York's lower East Side where she lives." LIFE Magazine, May 13, 1957
Born	(1922-03-28)March 28, 1922 Newark, N.J.
Died	November 15, 2008(2008-11-15) (aged 86) Baltimore, M.D.
Nationality	American
Known for	Painting
Movement	Abstract Expressionism

Grace Hartigan (March 28, 1922 – November 15, 2008) was a second-generation American Abstract Expressionist painter and a member of the New York School.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, of Irish-English descent, Hartigan was the oldest of four children. Encouraging her romantic fantasies, her father and grandmother often sang songs and told her stories. Her mother, however, disapproved. At seventeen she was married to Robert Jachens. A planned move to Alaska, where the young couple planned to live as pioneers, ended in California, where Hartigan began painting with her husband's encouragement. After her husband was drafted in 1942, Hartigan returned to New Jersey to study mechanical drafting at the Newark College of Engineering. She also worked as a draftsman in an airplane factory to support herself and her son. During this time, she studied painting with Isaac Lane Muse. Through him, she was introduced to the work of Henri Matisse and Kimon Nicolaïdes’s The Natural Way to Draw, which influenced her later work as a painter.

In 1945, Hartigan moved to New York City, and quickly became a member of the downtown artistic community. Her friends included Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Frank O'Hara, Knox Martin, and many other painters, artists, poets, and writers. Hartigan gained her reputation as part of the New York School of artists and painters that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and '50s. She was often thought of as a “second generation Abstract Expressionist”, being heavily influenced by her colleagues of the time. Though she built her early career upon more of a complete abstraction, in the early fifties Hartigan began to incorporate more recognizable motifs and characters into her paintings. In the early fifties, she actually exhibited for a time under the name George Hartigan in order to try to achieve better recognition for her work.