Grace Hartigan (American, 1922–2008) was a leading Abstract Expressionist painter, known for work that combined gestural abstraction with imagery derived from art history or pop culture. Famed critic Clement Greenberg was an early champion of her work, singling her out for inclusion in the 1950 exhibition “New Talent” at Kootz Gallery, which launched her career in New York. She was subsequently included in the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal exhibitions “12 Americans” in 1954 and “The New American Painting” in 1958.

Born and raised in Newark, NJ as the eldest of four children, Hartigan never had the option of attending college, though she trained in mechanical drafting in the mid-1940s and studied with the painter Isaac Lane Muse. She married at 17, and her husband encouraged her interest in painting. After their divorce Hartigan would go on to marry three more times. Hartigan moved to New York quickly as her commitment to painting developed, and befriended many luminaries of the art scene, including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and, notably, Jackson Pollock, who became a kind of mentor to Hartigan as she continued to develop her abstract work. By 1958, Hartigan was named “the most celebrated of the young American women painters” by Life magazine.

Hartigan’s work has been displayed and collected around the world, with solo shows at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York in 1951–55, the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1980, the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York in 2001, and Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York in 1993, among many others. Her work appears in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim Foundation in both New York and Venice, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and more.

Hartigan died in Baltimore, MD on November 15, 2008 at the age of 86.