wildbrush's art.to.day - grace hartigan - salute: the canal to the sky

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wildbrush's art.to.day

• Grace Hartigan


	HARTIGAN Grace; born 1922 in Newark, New Jersey - American painter.
	1920	After high school she moved to Los Angeles, where she took her first drawing class.
	1942	Returned to New Jersey and studied mechanical drafting. It was wartime, and she worked in an airplane factory, painting watercolor still lifes in her spare time.
	1945	In 1945 Hartigan moved to New York to be in the center of the art world. She was one of the first young artists to admire Abstract Expressionism at a time when few took contemporary American art seriously. Greatly influenced by the Abstract Expressionists, she quickly absorbed their spontaneous, abstract style, but she also became interested in the works of the European old masters, such as Raphael, Rubens, and Caravaggio.
	1959	The Museum of Modern Art in New York sent an exhibition called "The New American Painting" to eight European countries. Only one woman was included in this famous exhibition - Grace Hartigan.
	1960	Hartigan moved to Baltimore, where she still lives and paints.
	The second generation of Abstract Expressionism. After World War II, America emerged as a great world leader and New York replaced Paris as the art center of the Western world. A group of New York artists called Abstract Expressionists captured the speed, energy, and power of American life with a new way of painting. Their spontaneous, gestural style, known as action painting, often revealed the raw physical vigor of the creative process. The application of the paint became their subject, as they slashed, spattered, spilled, and splashed it onto their canvases. Soon younger artists flocked to New York to become part of the New York School. They adopted the energetic, gestural style of the older Abstract Expressionists but turned from purely abstract art to recognizable subjects-landscapes, still lifes, and figures. Grace Hartigan belongs to this "second generation" of Abstract Expressionists.


from 'the salute series' - 'the canal to the sky', 1960, screenprint, 35,2 x 43,6 cm (ca. 14 x 17 ") [ back to 'artist listing' ]