Curtis Cathy - Restless ambition : Grace Hartigan, painter

when i met grace hartigan she came out to California in 1988 for the opening of The Figurative Fifties, a museum exhibition that included paintings of hers from the 1950sshe was an earthy and voluble sixty-six-year-old woman, enjoying a second hurrah of renown. I was a young cultural reporter and art critic at the Los Angeles Times, pleased that her chattiness was making my job so easy.

Sitting on her sunny hotel balcony, Grace talked about how, when she was thirty-one and her painting The Persian Jacket was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, she no longer had to live on oatmeal and bacon ends. About how odd it was to see a photograph of herself in Newsweek in 1959, across the page from a shot of Judy Garland. And about how, although she considered herself an Abstract Expressionist, she felt absolutely free to use recognizable images in her work. You dont live a category, she said. You were just hanging out with a lot of interesting people.

Fast-forward to October 2010. Visiting the Museum of Modern Art on a trip to New York, I rounded a corner at the Abstract Expressionist New York exhibition and came face to face with a nearly eight-foot-tall painting. I was stunned at the power and beauty of its slashing blocks of vivid colora work that held its own among canvases by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Peering at the label, I saw that this was Shinnecock Canal (plate 11), painted by Grace in 1957.

Who was this woman who had shouldered her way to the top of the male club that was the New York art world of her era? How did she get there, and why did she fall so abruptly off the art map? Always fascinated by biography, I was avidly reading obituaries in search of someone whose life combined great achievement with a complex, intriguing personality. Now I had finally found her.

I called Paul Schimmel, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. He had co-organized The Figurative Fifties at what was then the Newport Harbor Art Museum. What did he think about my writing a biography of Hartigan? Very good idea, he said, giving me a list of key art-world people to contact.

I discovered that Grace had entered adulthood with no goals except to escape her family. But once she became a painter, her self-regard and ferocious drive colored her relationships with the men she loved and the women she held at arms length, and caused a fatal breach with her only child.

Although Grace lived to be eighty-six, I decided to devote nearly half of this biography to the 1950s, the decade of her finest paintings, when she managedagainst great oddsto carve out a major career in New York. In dealing with this period, I broadened my focus to look at the personalities and achievements of those interesting people Grace hung out with and at the ways her life both resembled and differed from that of other women painters in her circle.

I came to understand that Graces professional life was a roller-coaster of struggle, triumph, neglect, and rediscovery, while her personal life was blighted by alcoholism, romantic missteps, and personal tragedy. Yet she never stopped believing in her talent and her vision. Alone, in the studio, she spent her finest hours.

A Note About the painting reproductions in this book: Some of the works I discuss at length are not included among the color plates. There are several reasons for this, including the unavailability of certain images, overly restrictive reproduction stipulations, and the need to limit book production costs.