Restless ambition : Grace Hartigan, painter

449 Pages·2015·5.32 MB·English

by  Curtis

Restless Ambition

Restless Ambition
Grace Hartigan, Painter
CATHY CURTIS
1
1
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© Cathy Curtis 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Curtis, Cathy (Writer on art)
Restless ambition : Grace Hartigan, painter / Cathy Curtis.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-939450-0 (alk. paper)
1. Hartigan, Grace. 2. Painters—United States—Biography.
3. Women painters—United States—Biography. I. Title.
ND237.H3434C87 2015
759.13—dc23
[B] 2014020233
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
In memory of my parents,
who taught me to read, encouraged my writing,
and were baffled by modern art

Contents
How I Came to Write This Book ix
Prologue: The Weekend That Changed Her Life 1
P ART ONE: Escape Artist (1922–1944)
1. Dreaming 7
2. Searching 20
3. Learning 26
PART TWO: New York Adventure (1945–1949)
4. Risking 35
5. Connecting 41
6. Coping 50
P ART THREE: Rising Star (1950–1955)
7. Struggling 61
8. Launching 86
9. Succeeding 105
10. Asserting 122
viii Contents
PART FOUR: Fame (1956–1960)
11. Celebrating 147
12. Swerving 165
PART FIVE: Beginning Again in Baltimore (1961–2008)
13. Drifting 197
14. Teaching 219
15. Unraveling 237
16. Renewing 264
17. Prevailing 278
Acknowledgments 303
Notes 307
Bibliography 381
Index 397
How I Came to Write This Book
when i met grace hartigan—she came out to California in 1988 for the
opening of The Figurative Fifties, a museum exhibition that included paint-
ings of hers from the 1950s—she was an earthy and voluble sixty-six-year-old
woman, enjoying a second hurrah of renown. I was a young cultural reporter
and art critic at the Los Angeles Times, pleased that her chattiness was making
my job so easy.
Sitting on her sunny hotel balcony, Grace talked about how, when she was
thirty-one and her painting The Persian Jacket was purchased by the Museum
of Modern Art, she no longer had to live on “oatmeal and bacon ends.” About
how odd it was to see a photograph of herself in Newsweek in 1959, across the
page from a shot of Judy Garland. And about how, although she considered
herself an Abstract Expressionist, she felt “absolutely free” to use recognizable
images in her work. “You don’t live a category,” she said. “You were just hang-
ing out with a lot of interesting people.”
Fast-forward to October 2010. Visiting the Museum of Modern Art on a
trip to New York, I rounded a corner at the Abstract Expressionist New York
exhibition and came face to face with a nearly eight-foot-tall painting. I was
stunned at the power and beauty of its slashing blocks of vivid color—a work
that held its own among canvases by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem
de Kooning. Peering at the label, I saw that this was Shinnecock Canal
(plate 11), painted by Grace in 1957.
Who was this woman who had shouldered her way to the top of the male
club that was the New York art world of her era? How did she get there, and
why did she fall so abruptly off the art map? Always fascinated by biography,
I was avidly reading obituaries in search of someone whose life combined
great achievement with a complex, intriguing personality. Now I had finally
found her.