Eleanor of Aquitaine
Hartigan, Grace, American painter, born 1922
1983
oil on canvas
Gift of Fay and Alfred Chandler, 1995

Grace Hartigan’s art involves many of the cogent questions of modernism. These include the relationship between past art and the avant-garde, the heritage of Abstract Expressionism, creation of a personal set of painterly symbols, the interaction between high art and popular culture, image versus abstraction and the distinctive characteristics of a woman’s vision.
Robert S. Mattison, Grace Hartigan, A Painter’s World, 1989
This assessment of Hartigan’s career summarizes her role in exploring the crucial issues that have shaped the history of contemporary art.

As a young artist coming of age in the late 1940s, Hartigan was a member of a circle of artists that included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Milton Avery, Larry Rivers and Alfred Leslie among others. With these artists, sympathetic critics, dealers and museum curators, Hartigan explored abstraction as a process of making art that was, at once, a tool of greater self-knowledge and capable of interpreting universal ideas.

Hartigan worked abstractly for about four years until she became aware that the method no longer served her needs. Following her second solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy gallery in 1952 she wrote, What have I learned from the show? I have learned a lot about content. I am less and less interested in ‘pure painting.’

In the wake of that revelation, Hartigan studied historical works by such diverse artists as Henri Matisse, Paul Cezanne, Albrecht Durer, Peter Rubens, Diego Velazquez, Francisco de Goya and others. The result of an intense period of inquiry led Hartigan to return to figuration. Clement Greenberg, an influential critic who supported the artist’s earliest work and promoted Pollock’s, felt that Hartigan had betrayed the cause of abstraction. She remembered, “[he] simply told me to stop painting that way... He said it was not modern.” Greenberg never modified his position. This attitude strained many of the friendships that the critic had developed over the years and led to the perception that he was dogmatic, one-painter critic for Pollock. And, when Pop art arrived on the scene in the 1960s, the critic remained unmoved by the new artistic developments it prompted.

Stylistically, Eleanor of Aquitaine merges Hartigan’s interest in using the tools of Abstract Expressionism (gestural strokes and richly fluid paint) with her deep appreciation for beautifully drawn line. The graceful, delicate strokes and broad, colorful forms used to render Eleanor’s figure betray Hartigan’s meditations on the work of Old and Modern Masters.

As a work from the 1983 series Great Queens and Empresses, Eleanor of Aquitaine draws on a source from popular culture (a Dover publication entitled Great Empresses and Queens Paper Dolls) and explores the nature of private and public identity, especially for women. The work features two views of Eleanor, one each of her public and private sides. Pictured in domestic garb (viewers left), her beauty and education are emphasized by her slender, sensuous form, her long red hair, and the book she clutches in her left hand. Her queenly attire (viewer’s right) represses those features and underscores her role as a bejeweled head of state. At a moment’s notice, Eleanor the woman may be transformed into Eleanor the queen simply by donning the appropriate costume. Thus, Eleanor of Aquitaine merges the visual language of Abstract Expressionism with engaging content drawn from popular culture.

Since 1967, Hartigan has been associated with the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work had been exhibited and collected widely by museums and private collectors. Through her work as an artist and a teacher, Hartigan continues to be an important force in the continuing development of contemporary American art.