Grace Hartigan, 86, an abstract painter, dies

Grace Hartigan/Corcoran Gallery of art "Summer Street", 1956.
Turning to the next item on Marty Katz/baltimorephotographer.comGrace Hartigan in his studio in 1993, with her painting "Junk shop with Egyptian violet".Grace Hartigan, a second-generation abstract expressionist whose gestural, intensely colored paintings often included images from popular culture, leading some critics to see in them prefigurings of pop art, died on Saturday in Baltimore. She was 86.The cause was liver failure, said Julian Weissman, a longtime dealer.Ms. Hartigan, a friend and disciple of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, subscribed to the notion of abstract expressionism brushstroke as existential Act and cri de coeur, but as Willem de Kooning, she never broke completely with the figurative tradition. Determined to stake out your own artistic ground, she turned outward from the Interior world sanctified the Abstract Expressionists and embraced the Visual swirl of contemporary American life.In "Grand street brides (1954), one of several early paintings that draw the immediate attention of critics and curators, she depicted bridal shop window mannequins in a composition based on Goya 's" Royal family ". Later paintings incorporated images taken from coloring books, movies, traditional paintings, shop windows and advertising, all in the service of art that one critic described as "intensely personal"."Her art was marked by willingness to use different styles in the modernist idiom, go back and forth from art historical references to pop culture references an autobiographical material," said Robert Mattison, author of "Saltonstol Grace Hartigan: a painter's world" (1990).Grace Hartigan was born in Newark in 1922 and grew up in rural New Jersey, the eldest of four children. Unable to afford college, she married early and the flight of romantic fantasies, she and her husband, Bob Jachens, struck out for Alaska to live like pioneers. They made it no further than California, where, with the support of her husband, she took the painting."I didn't choose painting," she later told an interviewer. "He chose me. I didn't have any talent. I just was a genius. "In the mid 1940 's, she left her husband, handed over to their son, Jeffrey, in the care of their parents and moved back to Newark, where she trained in mechanical design and took painting lessons with Isaac Lane Muse. After moving to the lower east side of Manhattan in 1945, it became part of the post-war art scene of New York, forming alliances with artists of Abstract Expressionists — although de Kooning reduced her to tears, telling her she completely misunderstood modern art — and poets like Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch.Ms. Hartigan won fame early. In 1950, the critic Clement Greenberg and the art historian Meyer Schapiro included her in their "new talent" show at the Kootz Gallery and a solo exhibition at the Gallery de Tibor Nagy soon followed. "Persian jacket," an early painting, was bought by Alfred Barr for the Museum of modern art.Barr and the Museum of modern art curator Dorothy Miller included her in two important shows, "12 Americans" in 1954 and "the new American painting" exhibition, which is organized in 1958 and 1959 and introduced abstract expressionism abroad. In 1958, Life magazine called her "the most celebrated the young American women painters."After starting as a purely abstract painter, Ms. Hartigan gradually images in her work. It was O'Hara imposition of high and low art in his poetry that have influenced her to cast far and wide for sources.In 1949, she married the artist Harry Jackson, "not one of my more serious marriages," she later said. Marriage was annulled after a year. In 1959, she married Robert Keene, a gallery owner, whom she divorced a year later. In 1960, she married Winston price, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University who collected modern art and bought one of her paintings. After injecting himself with an experimental vaccine against encephalitis in 1969 and Contracting spinal meningitis, he began a long descent into physical and mental illness, which ended with his death in 1981.Ms. Hartigan is survived by a brother, Arthur Hartigan Huntington Beach, California; sister, Barbara Sesee of North Brunswick, New Jersey; and three grandchildren. Her son, Jeffrey Jachens, died in 2006.Ms. Hartigan go to Baltimore coincided with a sharp transition in artistic fashion, as pop art and minimalism eclipsed abstract expressionism. Of the attention Ms. Hartigan began she remembered as "isolated creative life". For decades she painted in a loft in a former Department store and was a teacher at the Maryland Institute College of art. The College established a graduate school around her, Hoffberger School of painting, of which she became a Director in 1965. She taught at the school until retiring last year.As historians and curators reassessed the history of postwar art, she experienced a revival of sorts. Its use of commercial imagery led her to be included in the "Hand-Painted pop," a 1993 exhibition at the Whitney Museum, despite its aversion to movement."Pop art is not painting because painting must have content and emotion," she said in the year 1960. On the other hand, it is reflected in the Whitney show, "I would much rather be a pioneer movement that I hate than the second generation movement that I love."Her work has been exhibited, most recently in may at the Jewish Museum in New York, in "action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning and American art, 1940-1976 Gg."On the artistic path marked by twists and turns and restless experimentation she claimed a fierce commitment to the modernist agenda and a belief in a near magical powers of art."Now as before it is a vulgar and vital and the possibility of its transformation into a beautiful, which continues to challenge and fascinate me," she told the reference work "artists of the world: 1950-1980.""Or, perhaps, for my art as the definition of humor is emotional pain remembered in tranquillity."More articles in arts» a version of this article appeared in print on November 18, 2008, on page B14 Edition New York.

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