In this painting inspired by the Shinnecock Canal, which runs through the South Fork of Long Island, Hartigan transforms landscape into a dynamic interplay of colliding colors and forceful gestures. "I want an art that is not 'abstract' and not 'realistic,'" she said. Hartigan was the only woman included in New American Painting, an exhibition organized by MoMA that traveled throughout Europe from 1956 to 1958 and helped to establish Abstract Expressionism as a dominant international style. In an attempt to circumvent the prejudice against women artists in the 1950s, she exhibited briefly under the name George Hartigan.
Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction, April 19 - August 13, 2017.
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Grace Hartigan
American, 1922–2008 41 works onlineThis impulse to search, question, and change is a recurrent theme in Hartigan’s life and work. She alternated between abstraction and representation, flouting the art world’s expectations by embracing subjects deemed anathema in the early 1950s: people, clichés, and snippets from modern life.
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Action painting
Art critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term “action painting” in 1952 to describe the work of artists who painted using bold gestures that engaged more of the body than traditional easel painting.
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Gestural
Relating to methods of applying a medium, such as paint, to a surface, often with active or sweeping body movements.
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New York School
An interdisciplinary, avant-garde movement of painters, sculptors, poets, dancers, musicians, and composers active in New York City in the 1950s and ’60s.
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