BCD#15

Blind Contour Drawing #15 “The Creeks” 1957 Grace Hartigan

Hartigan was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1922. Her interest in art didn’t begin until she was in her early 20’s. At 17 she fled New Jersey with her first husband Robert Jachens. The couple were headed to Alaska to homestead but turned around when they ran out of money and Hartigan discovered she was pregnant. Jachens was drafted in WWII and Hartigan lived with his parents, raising their son, Jeffrey. She worked as a mechanical draughtsman during the war. She escaped her dreary life by immersing into the world of art through books. She began taking art classes after being introduced to the work of Matisse, sparking a lifelong interest in modern art.

In 1945, she separated from her husband and moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan to paint. Hartigan quickly became part of the inner circle of the Abstract Expressionists after meeting Rothko and Gottlieb.

At this time, she signed her work as George Hartigan, in honour of the 19th century women writers Georges Sand and George Eliot. She married twice in the 1940’s and both relationships ended because of the attention her work was receiving in the art world. She struggled financially and took odd jobs to support herself. In January 1948, after seeing a Jackson Pollock exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, a new passion and perspective was ignited in her work.

Hartigan pursued this new energy and spent a week with Pollock and his wife, artist Lee Krasner, at their home in the Hamptons. Pollock encouraged Hartigan to look at the work of Willem de Kooning. In particular, she appreciated de Kooning’s study of the Old Masters and how he was breaking barriers between representation and abstract. Soon after, Hartigan began inserting recognizable images into her abstract paintings, which often consisted of thick, complex geometric shapes.

This new perspective earned her a solo debut at New York’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1951. The following year she spent making studies based on Old Master paintings and she began to incorporate more recognizable imagery from her daily life into her work. These changes isolated her from her Abstract Expressionist friends, such as Joan Mitchell, and she lost the support from critic Clement Greenberg, which devastated Hartigan.

Hartigan painted intensely coloured gestural figures, inspired by coloring books, film, canonical painting, advertising, and life around her. The infamous painting “Marilyn,” which scatters facial features such as oversized lips and sparkling teeth across the canvas, was a breakthrough for her. Breaking up Monroe’s face was new and exciting for the time, while also challenging the standard for beauty.

Hartigan’s paintings were shown in ‘12 Americans’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1956, and in ‘The New American Painting,’ which traveled to eight European cities from 1958 to 1959. She was one of few women painters to receive that level of exposure at the time. Hartigan was hailed by Life magazine as one of the best young female American painters.

In 1960, she married her fourth husband, Winston Price, a collector of modern art and an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University. She moved with him to Baltimore and began teaching in the MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art in 1965 and became director of the Hoffberger School of Painting. Her husband died in 1981 after an adverse reaction to a vaccine. She gave up drinking in 1983, after a failed attempt at suicide and lived until she was 86 years old.

She was a professor for 42 years and continued to paint until her death. She is well respected not only for her work but for her perseverance despite ofttimes heavy criticism.

Her distinct style has caused critics and historians to call Grace Hartigan both an Abstract Expressionist painter and a pioneer of Pop art. She was not happy however with either categorization because she believed that paintings must have content and emotion.  She has also been an admired pioneer of feminist art but disliked her paintings being judged according to gender.

Born: March 28, 1922 – Newark, New Jersey

Died: November 15, 2008 – Baltimore, Maryland

BCD#5

Blind Contour Drawing #5 – a portion of “La Vie En Rose” Joan Mitchell 1979

Cezanne, Matisse and Van Gogh were Joan Mitchell’s gods and she is my goddess.

Mitchell’s abrupt mannerism led many to interpret her work as expressions of anger and violence.  However, Mitchell had a life long adoration of painting and was inspired by landscape, nature and poetry.  She felt that poetry was the art form most analogous to her own.

Mitchell was influenced by her mother who was a poet, writer and editor.  Her father was a successful doctor and often took her and her sister to museums.  She perused her love of art by attending the Art Institute of Chicago in 1944 to study painting.  After her studies, she moved to New York City where she was first introduced to the ideas the New York School, which was dominated by the Abstract Expressionists.  On a travelling fellowship from school, she left for Paris a year later.

Back in NY City by 1949, she quickly immersed in the local Abstract Expressionist scene. She gathered at the Cedar Street Tavern with other artists and poets and became friends with painters such as de Kooning and Kline. She was one of the few women artists asked to join the exclusive Artists’ Club in Greenwich Village.  In 1951, she was included in their seminal 9th Street: Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, curated by Leo Castelli.

The success of her first solo exhibition at The New Gallery in 1952 led to yearly exhibitions at the Stable Gallery. Mitchell’s early success in the 1950s was striking at a time when few women artists were recognized.

Mitchell had synesthesia which is a “neurological condition in which a person experiences “crossed” responses to stimuli. It occurs when stimulation of one sensory or pathway (i.e.hearing) leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway (i.e. vision).”  She didn’t know she suffered from it and often thought she was crazy, to the point of being suicidal. Painting made life bearable and by the mid 1950’s she fully embraced the idea that the canvas was hers to express her emotions.

Her work became more confident and she developed the qualities that would continue to define her paintings.  Her use of colour, her hand done marks and the tension she created between bold and subtle elements.  She was a careful and slow painter even though her work often looks so spontaneous.

In 1959 she moved to France permanently which was a bold move considering New York’s prominence in the art scene.  She fell in love with a French Canadian painter, Jean-Paul Riopelle. They had a stormy yet artistic relationship for 24 years. Painting was how Mitchell confronted and dealt with the circumstances of her life.  She created the painting “La vie en rose” after Riopelle left, Rose had been her nickname from him.

She referred to herself as the “last Abstract Expressionist,” and she continued to create abstract paintings until her death in 1992.

 

Born: February 12, 1925 – Chicago, Illinois
Died: October 30, 1992 – Vetheuil, France