Artist Abstract:
Grace Hartigan was a pioneering force within Abstract Expressionism, and remains one of the most celebrated women artists of the mid-twentieth century. A prominent figure in the downtown art scene with Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, and the poet Frank O'Hara, she was among the few women artists included in the seminal Ninth Street Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture in 1951. She received widespread acclaim throughout the 1950s, and she was included in Clement Greenberg's Talent 1950 alongside artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, was featured in the important show, Twelve Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956 and was the only woman featured in MoMA's important exhibition, The New American Painting (1958-1959), which toured nationally and internationally and helped establish Abstract Expressionism on a global stage. Hartigan had numerous solo exhibitions at Tibor de Nagy and Martha Jackson Gallery.
Hartigan's Blue Collage #2, inscribed "E.H." at the lower right, was created in 1957 when the artist was living and working in East Hampton amid the thriving East End community of Abstract Expressionists. By this time, many of the artists within Hartigan's New York circle, including Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning, had established close ties to the East End, where their community continued beyond the city.


Hartigan's work is held in the collections of major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland. Her continued significance is reaffirmed through major recent exhibitions, including Women of Abstract Expressionism at the Denver Art Museum, Colorado (2016); Action, Gesture, Paint at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023); the traveling exhibition Abstract Expressionists: The Women, currently on view at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky; and Grace Hartigan: The Gift of Attention, opening at the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska, in August 2026.