grace hartigan
At 19, Grace Hartigan (1922–2008) planned to move to Alaska with her husband, Robert Jachens, where they would live like pioneers. However, when her Jachens was drafted in 1942, Hartigan returned to New Jersey with her newborn and enrolled in the Newark College of Engineering, where she studied mechanical drafting and practiced it in an airplane factory to support her family while making watercolors on the side.
After graduation from Newark College, she took private painting lessons with Isaac Lane Muse. Through him, she was introduced to the work of Henri Matisse and to Kimon Nicolaïdes’ The Natural Way to Draw. When she moved to New York, Hartigan joined the downtown artistic community and became interested in Abstract Expressionism after seeing Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. Pollock and Willem de Kooning ultimately became her informal mentors.
From 1964 until the end of her life, Hartigan taught at what is now the Maryland Institute College of Art, while exhibiting widely. She continually moved between figuration and abstraction throughout her long career, concentrating on representation in her later paintings from the 1980s through the 2000s. Her work is in the collections of most major American museums, including the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
