by Jon Lackman | 18 November 2008 | Modern
From the Baltimore Sun:
Before she passed away Saturday after a long illness, Grace Hartigan was adamant, even imperious about the arrangements for how she would be memorialized. And she will get her way, as Hartigan, a seminal figure in the U.S. art world and a longtime Baltimore resident, usually did. “There will be no memorial service. She said that her memorial should be more about her body of work than about her physical body. She’s always felt that way,” says Rex Stevens, chairman of the drawing and general fine arts department at the Maryland Institute College of Art. The 86-year-old painter will be cremated, he said.
From the New York Observer:
The Baltimore Sun reports that Grace Hartigan, the second-generation Abstract Expressionist and one-time New York painter, has died. Hartigan was 86. She was one of the last members of the hardboiled and cigarette-lean generation of American artists that followed Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. The Sun bit is touchingly hometown. The story focuses on Hartigan’s role at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where the artist taught from the mid-60s onward. It is also worth remembering, farther back, that Hartigan was once the pre-eminent woman painter in New York of the 1950s–at a time when the art world numbered no more than several hundred artists, dealers, collections, (imperial) critics and very few women … For one last tribute to Hartigan, go out to Green River Cemetery, Long Island, and seek out the grave of the poet Frank O’Hara. Prepare to make a rubbing. For sometime in the 50s, Hartigan became friends with O’Hara, and her name may or may not be inscribed on the poet’s tombstone: ‘Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible.”
