“Ninth Street Women”

Grace Hartigan - The Persian Jacket - 1952 - Oil on canvas - 57 1/2 x 48 in. - Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) - New York (click photo for larger image)Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler — Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art is an extensive book authored by Mary Gabriel that everyone is talking about these days. It focuses on artists Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler—and their contributions to modern art. Find out a bit more about the work in an excellent New York Times review written by Jennifer Szalai.

We’ll be looking at all of these artists on What About Art? (and we already have features on some of them).

The work featured here today is by American artist Grace Hartigan (1922-2008). Although she was a second-generation Abstract Expressionist—she is often associated with the first-generation members of that movement, such as Pollock and deKooning. Her work certainly embodies the bold and gestural experimentation exemplified by those artists.

“Hartigan's best-known works combine the abstraction of her early work with recognizable images from everyday life or motifs from art history, particularly from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The distinction between abstraction and figuration is often blurred by her experimental brushwork and lack of shading.” (The Art Story)

One interesting bit of trivia is that The Persian Jacket needed a bit of touch up by the artist after it was brought to MoMA by Museum Art Director, Alfred Barr. The artist apparently rushed right down with her oil paints and was able to make the required corrections in about a half-hour!