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BCD#35

Blind Contour Drawing #35 “Sunday Morning” Helen Parsons Shepherd

In her early days, contemporaries found Helen Parsons Shepherd’s desire to be an artist objectionable not because she was a woman, but because she was a Newfoundlander. Her parents regarded creative activities as hobbies; her father, a poet in his spare time, worked professionally as a lawyer. Before Parsons Shepherd helped transform Newfoundland and Labrador’s cultural landscape, St. John’s had no art scene to speak of—not a single commercial gallery or art school.

Discouraged, therefore, from studying the one interest she had been passionate about since childhood, Parsons Shepherd drifted along various career paths, attending one year at Memorial University College, then studying for four months at a nursing school in Montreal, then clerking for a year in her father’s office. Finally, perceiving the aimlessness of these pursuits, her father relented and, in 1944, paid the tuition for his daughter to attend the Ontario College of Art; she was only the second Newfoundlander to enroll.

At OCA, Parsons Shepherd met fellow student Reginald Shepherd, whom she would marry. Upon graduation, the couple returned to Newfoundland, determined to survive as artists in a province without an established milieu. Despite the risks, they purchased a three-story Victorian house, renovating the lower two floors into the structure that opened in 1949 as the Newfoundland Academy of Art, the province’s first art school. “We had nothing to lose,” Parsons Shepherd asserted in the face of the challenges before them.

Indeed, they gained a great deal. From an enrollment of 21, the school soon expanded to 120 students, aged 8 to 80. Parsons Shepherd taught classes at the school, as well as at four local convents. For eleven years, the academy emboldened the development of the city’s creative community.

However, thanks to the limited financial support offered for art education in Newfoundland, the academy struggled to hire and keep teachers. In 1961, the academy closed. Parsons Shepherd and her husband decided to focus solely on their own art, which had been neglected under the demands of operating their school.

Although Parsons Shepherd is remembered for her remarkable still life paintings and her images of Newfoundland street scenes, she earned a successful livelihood as a portraitist, commissioned to paint so many elite public figures—including Prince Philip in 1976—that she became informally celebrated as St. John’s “Court Painter.” Working from photographs and using notes taken during hour-long conversations with her subjects (who provided locks of hair to ensure Parsons Shepherd’s colour matches), her portraits captured a person’s distinguishing energy. Her biographer Ronald Rompkey remarked, “As a portraitist, she understood the person. She didn’t just paint a picture, she would bring something out.”

Parsons Shepherd remained an artist her entire life, committed to creative exploration till the end. She was an artist with a singular passion, breaking down the barriers of Newfoundland conventions so successfully that her once reluctant father eventually celebrated her paintings in much of his later poetry.

 

Born: 1923, St.John’s, Newfoundland
Died: 2003, St.John’s, Newfoundland

 

 

Sources:

 

“Helen Parsons Shepherd.” Heritage: Newfoundland and Labrador. https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/arts/helen-parsons-shepherd.php

 

Rompkey, Ronald. Reginald Shepherd, Helen Parsons Shepherd: A Life Composed. Breakwater Books, 2005.

 

Sullivan, J.M. “The ‘Court Painter’ of Newfoundland Founded the Province’s First Art School.” The Globe and Mail, 4 July 2008.

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BCD#29

Blind Contour Homage #29 – “Island of Rocks” – Florence McGillivray

“She was the best.” Tom Thomson on Florence McGillivray

Although relatively unknown now, Florence McGillivray was a leading Canadian artist in her time. Born to a wealthy family (her father was a Scottish immigrant with a well-situated farm in Whitby, Ontario), McGillivray’s early talent as an artist was encouraged through private lessons with esteemed southern Ontarian artists. McGillivray capitalized on this good fortune by charging 25 cents to her friends and classmates for lessons sharing what she had learned. She added to her earnings by selling her paintings in local fairs.

This youthful shrewdness characterized McGillivray’s entire career; talent, good fortune, and keen curiosity ensured that she remained abreast of leading artistic movements, figures, and techniques. Travelling to Europe in 1913, she studied in Paris’s Academie de la Grand Chaumiere, earning admiration when her painting Contentment was exhibited in the prestigious Salon des Beaux-Arts. In Paris, she was mentored and encouraged by Matisse, Simon, and Menard, and she studied “Realist, Nabis and Fauvist palettes and pictorial construction,” which she imported to Canada when she was forced home after the outbreak of World War I. Back in Ontario, she mentored Tom Thomson, who declared McGillivray one of the best painters in Canada. In fact, Katharine Lochnan (McGillivray’s great-great niece) and art historian Sarah Stanners argue that McGillivray had the single greatest influence on Thomson’s work, solving the mystery behind the European styles in Thomson’s work.

Yet, despite her connection with the Group of Seven, McGillivray’s name does not receive the same level of recognition. This oversight is due in part to her family’s wealth; her comfortable lifestyle meant she was not forced to sell her paintings. But she has also been overlooked because of her gender. Art historian Regina Haggo explains that it “was difficult for a Canadian woman to become a professional artist a hundred years ago. Women were supposed to get married, have babies and stay at home. And because McGillivray was female, her work was undervalued by critics and ignored by art historians. … Moreover, taming nature with a brush was a job for a man. Women were deemed to be intellectually incapable of painting landscape. A woman artist was expected to paint pretty images of domestic life.”

But McGillivray rejected expectations for female artists. Instead, she used “the palette knife, masses of colour, and a strong black line around forms” to develop her signature style—a method influenced by her interactions with European artists, but cultivated independently as she experimented throughout her career. Her entire life was spent seeking creative inspiration and education. Just as she painted landscapes of the Gatineau valley, Labrador, and Newfoundland, she also travelled widely abroad—to Trinidad, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Alaska, and beyond—in search of new vistas and styles. When she died in Toronto in 1938, she left behind an enormous body of work. Only in recent years has it been rediscovered and celebrated for its significant contribution to the Canadian modernist movement.

Born: 1864, Whitby, Ontario
Died: 1938, Toronto

Sources:

Allen, W.C. “Following Florence.” Gatineau Valley Historical Society. http://www.gvhs.ca/publications/utga-following-florence.html

The Florence McGillivray Project. “Florence’s Stories.” https://florencemcgillivray.ca

Haggo, Regina. “Florence McGillivray Tamed Nature with a Brush.” Hamilton Spectator, January 7, 2017. https://www.thespec.com/whatson-story/7050268-regina-haggo-florence-mcgillivray-tamed-nature-with-a-brush/

Lochnan, Katharine and Sarah Stanners. “The Group of Eight.” Canadian Art, October 10, 2017. https://canadianart.ca/features/the-group-of-eight/

Murray, Joan. Tom Thomson: Design for a Canadian Hero. Dundern Press, 1998.

Prakash, A.K. Independent Spirit: Early Canadian Women Artists. Firefly Books, 2008.

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BCD#24

Blind Contour Drawing #24 –
“I have spoken with this green person”
– Rachel Berman 2010

Once known as Susan King, Rachel Berman reclaimed her birth name as an adult after she successfully discovered the names and of her biological parents and her own birth story. She was born in New Orleans in 1946 and was raised by foster parents in Victoria B.C. She abandoned the foster system at an early age and lived a tough life.

She was a self taught artist and traveled and worked in the U.S., Ireland and in Canada, she eventually settled in Victoria B.C. where she grew up. She worked as a greeting card artist. Her quirky animal characters, Mooky McBeth and Vanessa Vanilla eventually became characters in children’s books. She was nominated for the Governor General’s award for English Language Children’s Literature-Illustration in 2009 and 2013.

Berman’s paintings were exhibited in many places but most frequently with The Ingram Gallery in Toronto. Her gallery paintings are hauntingly beautiful. She drew from her experiences in the streets of London, Dublin, New York, Toronto and downtown Vancouver. She never owned a camera but spent hours sketching in housekeeping rooms, worn hotel lobbies, cafes, and metro stations. The mysterious figures and hidden stories in her paintings are a reflection of the struggles and mysteries she lived through herself. She once said that her paintings were autobiographical, her search for herself.

Berman suffered from HIV and hid her illness from her loved ones for a long time. She was ashamed of her early drug addiction and lifestyle. However, she felt AIDS made her grateful: “It did give me time to think, not about what the disease has taken away from me but what it has given me, and for which I now am most grateful, for life is most generous … – I have to live today like it is the best day in the world — & I now have the wisdom to know that it is.”

She was known to deliver envelopes stuffed with drawings, philosophy, calligraphy, rambling love letters and poetry, usually by bicycle in the early hours of morning to friends, loved ones and even strangers. She was an apparition in an overcoat and described as a “quiet observer of life, a thinker and a humanist.”

Born: 1946, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States

Died: May 28, 2014, Victoria

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BCD#22

Blind Contour Drawing #22 – “Fingal” Gillian Ayres, 2005

Gillian Ayres was born in 1930 in Barnes, London and grew up in comfort due to her family’s hat making business. She developed interest in art early and enrolled at the age of 16 in the Camberwell School of Art and Crafts.

Ayres exhibited with Young Contemporaries in 1949 and with the London Group in 1951. Her first solo show was at Gallery One, London, in 1956. The following year she was commissioned to create a large-scale mural for South Hampstead High School for Girls. It was not appreciated at the time and was quickly covered with wallpaper. Luckily it was rediscovered in 1983 in nearly perfect condition.

She met her husband, Henry Mundy at school and they married in 1951. They had two sons and eventually divorced in 1981 but remained friends and continued to live together in the same house painting in their separate studios. Mundy and many of his friends were ex-servicemen, their distain towards traditionalists suited Ayres anti-authoritarian attitude and helped her find her voice in abstraction.

Ayres’ early works were usually made with thin vinyl paint with a limited palette. She matured as an artist in the 1950s, in the heyday of “experimental art.” Her rebellious nature helped her to become one of the first British admirers of Jackson Pollock.

Her later works in oil paint are very colourful and thick with paint. Her huge canvases were often worked on in sitting-rooms and bedrooms while her bantams, peacocks, cats and dogs roamed freely from her garden to the kitchen to the studio. The marks of their paws and claws may still be detected in some paintings.

In 1957 Ayres showed at the significant exhibition Metavisual, Tachiste, Abstract: Painting in England Today, at the Redfern gallery. She was the only woman in the Situation exhibition at the RBA Galleries in 1960, the first group show of British abstract art of the new decade.

Ayres worked part-time at the AIA Gallery from 1951-59 before starting to teach. She held a number of teaching positions through the 1960s and 1970s. In 1959, she was asked to teach at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, for six weeks. They asked her to stay and she remained on the teaching staff until 1965.

In 1965 she became a senior lecturer at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, she stayed there until 1978 when she became head of painting at Winchester School of Art in 1978, she was the first female teacher in the UK to this position. She left teaching in 1981, and moved north-west Wales to become a full-time painter. 1987 she relocated to the North Devon-Cornwall border where she remained for the rest of her life.

She smoked about 3 packs of cigarettes a day, worked throughout the night if she felt like it, gave money to friends, wasn’t much of a housekeeper, collected broken pieces of china and loved Elizabethan poetry. Her favourite painter was Rubens. Ayres ignored most advice, including medical and didn’t have much time for current affairs.

Ayres was one of Britain’s most significant abstract painters and has been described as courageous, independent, determined with a generous heart.

She died at the age of 88 near her beloved cottage and studio in North Devon. Her paintings and prints are held by major museums and galleries around the world.

Born: 1930, London
Died: 2018, North Devon

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BCD#21

Blind Contour Drawing #21 – “Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood,” – Hilma af Klint 1907

Hilma af Klint was the fourth child of five to a Swedish naval commander and mathematician. The family spent summers at their manor on the island of Adelsö. She formed a strong connection to nature in these idyllic surroundings, which would later influence her work.

When the family moved to Stockholm, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Stockholm, where she learned portraiture and landscape painting. In 1882, by the age of 20, she was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. After graduating with honors, she was awarded a scholarship in the form of an art studio, where her landscapes and portraits became the source of income and independence. The Scandinavian education system was well ahead of the French and German systems and allowed women into their Academies. It was not uncommon for women to make a living from their art.

Af Klint’s 10 year old sister, Hermina died in 1880. The grief and the loss sparked her interest in spiritualism and religion. She began meeting with ‘The Five’, or ‘De Fem’ – a group of five of female artists who met secretly to seek communication with mystic beings. Conducting séances and creating automatic drawings, they communed regularly with these spirits they called the “High Masters.”

Her knowledge of botany, geometry, mathematics, natural sciences, world religions and her interest in spiritually accumulated in what the art world now recognizes as the first abstract paintings in history. In 1906, she was painting and working in abstraction at least 5 years earlier before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and others would create similar moves to rid their work of representational content.

She worked in private, selling her landscapes and portraits. She did not spend time promoting herself, publishing manifestos or participating in exhibitions as her contemporaries did. Even in her old age, she did not believe the world was ready for her work and included in her will that not a single item from her over 1,200 piece estate which included paintings, drawings and writings be shown until 20 years after her death.

She passed away on October 21, 1944 in the aftermath of a traffic accident, nearly 82 years old. When she died none of her abstract works had ever been shown to the public.

Since 2013, when the Modern Museum in Stockholm hosted an exhibition dedicated solely to her work, af Klint is now generally considered to be the pioneer and inventor of abstract art. Her first abstract work was painted in 1906.

Born: October 26, 1862, Solna, Sweden
Died: October 21, 1944, Danderyd Municipality, Sweden

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BCD#19

Blind Contour Drawing #19 – “Falling from the Sky” Tsuneko Kokubo 2013

Tsuneko Kokubo was born in Steveston B.C., in 1937, and raised in by her Grandparents during WWII in Japan. Returning to Canada in her late teens, she studied Fine Arts for four years at Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University), focusing on drawing and painting.

She has worked extensively in theatre as a performer, dancer, costume designer and continues to do so.  In 1990, she became a full-time painter, working mainly in oils and acrylics.  Her life, like many other Japanese Canadians has been filled with hardship but she chooses to focus on beauty, especially from her garden and mountain home.  She weaves bright colours, images of plants and her life memories to create beautiful and often haunting stories on canvas.

Kokubo has had numerous exhibitions, and has paintings in private collections in Canada, Europe, Japan, Mexico and the USA.

Born: 1937, Steveston, B.C. Canada

Tsuneko Kokubo’s website:  tsunekokokubo.ca

You can learn more about Japanese Canadian artists in this wonderful directory: japanesecanadianartists.com

This is a beautiful short video that was made of Kokubo (Koko) that I would recommend watching:

https://tellingthestoriesofthenikkei.wordpress.com/falling-from-the-sky-tsuneko-kokubo-koko/

I inspire to see her work in person one day and hope to be painting well into my 80’s.

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BCD#18

Blind Contour Drawing #18 – Malade by Gabriele Munter, 1917

Though not widely known, the German painter, Gabriele Münter made important contributions to the art of the twentieth century.

Münter was born to upper middle class parents in Berlin. She began to draw and play piano as a child and her family supported her love of art. She had a private tutor and took classes at the Woman’s Artist School, since women were not allowed to enroll in German Academies.

Both her parents died before she turned 21. Munter and her sister inherited a large amount of money, allowing them to live freely and independently. Since she didn’t feel challenged by her schooling, the two young women decided take a trip to the United States to visit extended family. They stayed for over two years, mainly in the state of Texas. Munter took this time for self study and there are 6 of her sketchbooks that survived that period. They depict images of people, plants and landscapes in the United States.

Returning to Germany, she enrolled in the Phalanx School of art in Munich in 1902. There she began to attend classes in still life, landscape, woodcut techniques, sculpture, and printmaking. She became romantically involved with the director of the school, Wassily Kandinsky. Their relationship lasted over 10 years.

In 1911 she formed Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) with Kandinsky. The group included Franz Marc, August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky and Paul Klee. The Blue Rider was one of the most important German group of artists of the 20th century

They promoted the connection between visual art and music and were inspired by the work of Henri Rousseau, spiritually-based color theory, and Bavarian folk art.

Münter exhibited paintings at the Blaue Reiter exhibitions of 1911 and 1912. She shared the groups love of  intense colour and expressiveness of line but her still lifes, figures, and landscapes remained representational rather than abstract.

At the beginning of WWI, she moved all of the works done by her, Kandinsky, and the other members of the Blaue Reiter to her house, where she hid them. She was able to preserve them despite several searches of the home, the pieces were never found. On her eightieth birthday, she gave her entire collection, more than 80 oil paintings and 330 drawings, to the Städtische Galerie in the Lenbachhaus in Munich.

After the war, Münter and Kandinsky went separate ways. She was inactive for a few years after their relationship ended but begain painting again in the late 1920s. Her palette changed and her focus too. She often painted portraits of women. She moved back to Germany with art historian, Johannes Eichner.

Münter’s work was exhibited in the 1960s in the U.S. for the first time and was shown at Mannheim Kunsthalle in 1961. The Gabrielle Münter and Johannes Eichner foundation was established and has become a valuable research center for Münter’s art, as well as the art that was done by Der Blaue Reiter group. Münter lived the rest of her life in Murnau, traveling back and forth to Munich. She died at her Murnau home on May 19 1962.

Throughout her 60-year artistic career she created more than 2000 paintings, several thousand drawings, water-colours, stained glass, prints and around 1200 photographs, and today she is increasingly considered to have made a striking con­tri­bution to the art of the twentieth century.

Born: February 19, 1877, Berlin, Germany
Died: May 19, 1962, Murnau am Staffelsee, Germany
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BCD#17

Blind Contour Drawing #17 “Reclining Nude Shepherdess” 1891 Berthe Morisot

Berthe Morisot was born in Bourges, France into a successful middle class family. They encouraged her and her sister Edma Morisot in their interest in art. Morisot showed promise from an early age and once she settled on pursuing art, her family continued to support her career. Her father, in particular admired strong will and perseverance.

At age 20, she made friends with landscape painter of the Barbizon school, Camille Corot, who introduced her to other artists and teachers. She took up plein air techniques and enjoyed painting small pieces outdoors and eventually larger works in a studio. Morisot was first accepted in the Salon de Paris in 1864 with two landscape paintings, and she continued to show regularly in the Salon until 1874, the year of the first impressionist exhibition.

She was acquainted with Edouard Manet in 1868, and in 1874 she married Eugene Manet, Edouard’s younger brother. She convinced Manet to attempt plein air painting, and drew him into the circle of the painters who became known as the impressionists. Her husband however, never saw himself as an Impressionist. He supported his wife and brother’s careers but didn’t appreciate the new art movement.

Morisot’s favourite subject, was her daughter Julie, who was born four years after her marriage to Eugène.  Like Mary Cassatt, Morisot was associated with “feminine” art because her subject matter was usually, women, children, and domestic scenes. Morisot painted what she saw in her immediate, everyday life. As a woman in the middle class, she saw domestic interiors, holiday spots, other women, and children. Her subject matter is equivalent to her male Impressionist colleagues. Edgar Degas painted rehearsals of the ballet, horse races, and apartments. Claude Monet painted his garden, his children, and his neighbour’s haystacks. Morisot’s art was labeled feminine because she was a woman, but her style and subject matter was similar to other Impressionists.

Morisot balanced her role of wife and mother with that of artist, something she had thought earlier to been impossible because she had been taught she would have to sacrifice marriage and motherhood for her art. The Manet family lived quietly, preparing for shows, traveling, which influenced changes in her landscapes, and entertaining their artist friends including Renoir, Degas and Whistler.

The 1890’s saw another change in Morisot’s style, outlines returned to her painting and strong forms put weight in her style. She withdrew somewhat with the death of her husband in 1892, focusing on preparing for her first solo show and spending time with her daughter and nieces. Morisot died in Paris before her solo show, at age 54.  She caught influenza while nursing her ill daughter.

The sentimentality and pureness found in Morisot’s paintings, seem strange because many people describe her as ambitious and stern. Her husband said she had “only an empty shell of a heart.”  Perhaps she painted a peaceful world she wanted, but did not experience.  Although, she was a loving mother and maintained loyal relationships, her paintings were a brave and beautiful mask of happiness that hid the despair and insecurity that haunted her as a female painter forging her way in the 19th century.

Born: January 14, 1841, Bourges, Cher, France

Died: March 2, 1895, Paris, France

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BCD#16

Blind Contour Drawing #16 “Composition avec tache rouge” 1916 Maria Blanchard

María Blanchard was born in Santander in Cantabria, Spain. Her mother had an accident during her pregnancy that meant Blanchard was born with severe disabilities such as a deformation of the spine. As a result, she had a hunchback and found it very difficult to walk. She was teased heavily at school, which left her emotional scarred. However, Blanchard found painting to be a great way of escaping and expressing how she felt.

Her family was a huge influence in Blanchard’s decision to follow a career in art. Her father provided her with love and knowledge of art, and he helped to cultivate her artistic talent in drawing.

In 1903, Blanchard moved to study in Madrid where she began training with Spanish artists such as Emilio Sala and Manuel Benedito. With Sala, Blanchard learnt the precision of drawing and the expressive use of colour.

In 1909, after winning the third prize for one of her paintings at the ‘Exposición Nacional de Bellas Artes,’ the Santander government decided to fund her education in the arts with a grant. With this aid, Blanchard went to study in Paris at the ‘Academie Vitti.’ While at the Academy, she discovered Cubism.

At the beginning of the WWI, Blanchard left Paris and returned to Madrid. She began teaching art in Salamanca and participated in some expositions. After the war, she returned to Paris, where she would spend the rest of her life.

In Paris, Blanchard began spending time with the many Cubist artists living there, and she was particularly good friends with the Cubist Spanish painter, Juan Gris. His influence can be seen in many of her paintings. She joined the Cubist art group and soon began developing her own style, involving bold colour that would often clash. Her paintings were very expressive and often intimidating. In the view of Jacques Lipchitz, Blanchard brought expressiveness and, above all, feeling to Cubism.

Her work attracted the attention of the most important art dealer at the time, Léonce Rosenberg. By 1919, he organized her first individual exhibition of cubist works. The following year she exhibited work in Belgium and France. In 1921, she showed work at the ‘Société des Artistes Indépendants.’ Her work was in high demand, however, due to the economic crisis following this period, many collectors stopped investing in her work. So despite her success, she became destitute. She had to rely on her friend, Frank Flausch, to support her and he did so until her death.

Blanchard’s good friend, Gris died in 1927, and the loss of this close friendship was too much for her to take. She became a recluse, even refusing to see any of her other artist friends. However, she did continue to paint.

Unfortunately, her health gradually got worse over the coming years, and at one point she contracted tuberculosis which made it impossible for her to paint. Eventually, in 1932, Blanchard died at the age of fifty-one.

Blanchard has been and continues to be one of the great unknown artists of the early 20th century. In the forties, it has been confirmed that her signature was removed from some of her work in order to add the name, Gris because of his higher market value. Art history tends to focus on Blanchard’s appearance and personal struggles with her health but recent investigation reveals that she was admired by her peers for her strong character and earned the respect of her colleagues, a difficult feat at the time, in a environment dominated by men. Curator, Maria Jose Salazar recently wrote that “her work has remained in the background in comparison with that of her avant-garde peers and friends. However, Blanchard was equal and in some cases superior to the latter, above all in her particular way of understanding and perceiving Cubism.”

 

Born: March 6, 1881 Santander, Spain
Died: April 5, 1932 Paris, France

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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