cover image Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter

Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter

Cathy Curtis. Oxford Univ, $34.95 (400p) ISBN 978-0-19-939450-0

This spirited biography is the first to chart the career of Abstract Expressionist Hartigan (1922–2008), a painter with as much swagger as any of her male peers, who was the only female artist included in many important midcentury exhibitions, such as the Museum of Modern Art’s The New American Painting, which toured Europe in the late 1950s. Curtis, a former writer for the Los Angeles Times, describes a young Hartigan spying on Gypsy caravans in Millburn, N.J., and tolerating a psychologically abusive mother. When Hartigan moved to New York City, it was like “running off with the gypsies.” There she formed key relationships with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Frank O’Hara, and the other artist-patrons of Greenwich Village’s fabled Cedar Tavern. Confident and strong willed, but privately full of doubts, Hartigan “always had to be the star of her personal show,” which complicated her love life with middling male artists—but it also pushed her painting into new territory. She made brave forays into figurative painting and was later recognized as a Pop Art precursor. Ultimately Curtis’s biography holds no big surprises. Devoting about half the book to the ’50s, she divides Hartigan’s career between the New York years and after, when Hartigan married a medical scientist, relocated to Baltimore, Md., and began teaching at the Maryland Institute College of Art, all while the quality of her work declined. Grappling with alcoholism later in life, the final chapters inevitably read like the hard comedown from a great high. Overall, an accessible portrait of a gutsy AbEx figure. [em]Agent: Lane Zachary, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth. (Mar.) [/em]