GRACE HARTIGAN (1922–2008)

Grace Hartigan, painter and teacher at the Maryland Institute College of Art, died on Saturday, reports Jacques Kelly in the Baltimore Sun. “Grace painted large canvases in big, strong patches and swerves of color,” wrote John Bernard Myers in his 1983 book, Tracking the Marvelous. “The paint strokes were relaxed and swift, wide and narrow.” He organized her first solo show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1951. “What she preferred was the art of the older generation—the so-called Abstract Expressionists: Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Still, Stamos, Baziotes. She admired them and became friendly with them,” Myers wrote. For many years, she also mixed with poets of the period in New York—John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara. In 1953, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred H. Barr Jr., bought one of her paintings, The Persian Jacket. In 1957, a Life magazine photo essay called her “the most celebrated of the young American women painters.” After marrying, she moved from New York to Baltimore. She joined the faculty of Maryland Institute College of Art in 1964. A 1993 New York Times article said she “sank from view faster than the Titanic” because she left the Manhattan art scene and tastes were changing. “I feel that I am an aristocrat as far as painting is concerned; I believe in beautiful drawing, in elegance, in luminous color and light,” she said in a 1990 biography. Her biographer, Robert Saltonstall Mattison, wrote, “She is one of the seminal figures of Abstract Expressionism, a real breakthrough artist.”