Grace Hartigan

Grace Hartigan (1922-2008) was an Abstract American artist born in Newark, New Jersey. She studied under the Newark painter Isaac Lane Muse while working as a mechanical draftsman in an airplane factory after her husband was drafted into the war. In 1945 the pair moved to New York where Muse introduced her to artists that were part of the Abstract Expressionism movement including Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, and Elaine de Kooning. Hartigan sought to create art that existed in a space between abstraction and representation. She was classified by critics as a second generation of the Abstract Expressionists. She took interest in low-culture subjects that aligned with the emergence of Pop Art. Her technique, which foregrounded material, was in line with abstraction. She did not adopt a signature style like other artists of the time and after gaining recognition for her large-scale, sensuous abstract paintings in 1950, she shifted her practice to an exploration of the Spanish Old Master painters such as Diego Velazquez and Francisco de Goya.