Monet to Matisse Audio Guide: Self-Guided Audio Tour
Work 11 of 11

Harvester, painted by Grace Hartigan in 1966.  

In large, bold gestures, yellow ochre-coloured forms pile on top of a wash of autumnal colours, like stained glass.  The American Grace Hartigan liked the power and effect of the painted line. She once said a line was like a lasso, you threw it up and ‘grabbed hold of something’.

Here, the black outline, wide, then narrow, suggests an amorphous shape, is it a human? A bird? The harvester of the title?

To create this work, Hartigan layered thin washes of oil paint, rubbing back some, and allowing others to pop through, like that bright diluted green, in the top right. Eventually, when the buildup of layers has achieved a sense of dimension, she plays with the surface of the painting. Finishing off with that thick black line that goes a little further to suggest something familiar.

Grace Hartigan was an adult when she first picked up a paintbrush, and the term ‘modern art’ wasn’t in her vocabulary, as she later said. At the age of 21, and pregnant, she joined a community art class with her equally young husband. The pair had decided to escape their hometown of New Jersey and become artists. 

Within a decade, Hartigan would completely devote herself to painting and become one of the leading artists of the second wave of New York’s Abstract Expressionism. 

Hartigan, wittily, attributed her career not to talent, but to ‘genius’. She first encountered the work of Henri Matisse in a book, while working as a draftsperson during the Second World War and she soon took up life drawing. Hartigan was powerfully impressed by the work of Jackson Pollack, whose large-scale paintings, made with drips and splashes achieved what was called ‘an all-over’ effect. 

After a second marriage to another artist who expected her to support his own art career and seeing no other way, she sent her young son to live with his grandparents and rented a studio in New York’s downtown. She became friends with Pollack and his artist wife Lee Krasner and a cast of New York artists and writers, including Helen Frankenthaler. 

Abstract Expressionism was an American innovation that joined together the raw, inner emotion of the German expressionists and the non-representational art of Mondrian and the Cubists. With its bold, aggressive energy and dominated by artists such as Pollock, Abstract Expressionism became known for a hyper-masculine spirit. Many women Abstract Expressionists were erased from its history, even though they were included in major exhibitions. In the mid nineteen fifties Grace Hartigan even signed her name as ‘George’ hoping to make more sales. 

By the nineteen-sixties, and in a final, fourth marriage, Grace Hartigan had left the scene of New York for Baltimore and was painting in a more figurative style, as you can see here. A now beloved art teacher and mentor. 

One hundred years of creative development between the Impressionists of the nineteenth century and the abstract painters of the twentieth century represented more than an evolution of styles.

This century of artistic evolution, combined with the vast social changes of the period, established the foundation for a new model of an art community.  With such huge cultural exchange, different art styles freely proliferated, making it nearly impossible for art to be readily identified with movements in the way of the past and establishing the art world as we know it today.