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.
Hartigan's friends and former students - and there are legions - can remember her by visiting the five dozen prints, collages, drawings and paintings (including four currently on display) at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Or, if they happen to be traveling out of town, they can check out her muscular, bold, highly colored canvases in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, or in the Art Institute of Chicago.
"Her work is represented in every modern major museum collection of American paintings," says Jay Fisher, deputy director of curatorial affairs for the BMA. "No one would ever consider her a regional artist. She just happened to be working in Baltimore."
Or the painter's fans can rent Shattering Boundaries: Grace Hartigan, the 2008 documentary about her life.
"Grace's influence as a painter is huge and widespread, and it will just continue to grow," says Stevens, who also was Hartigan's longtime personal assistant.
"She and Larry Rivers simultaneously invented pop art. She was on a life's journey to find her own voice, and I think she succeeded. She had a restless spirit, and was quite inventive. A Grace Hartigan painting snapped like a sword."
Before moving to Baltimore in 1960, Hartigan was an intimate colleague of some of the most influential members of the Abstract Expressionist movement: Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. She and the abstract artist Franz Kline were lovers for two years.
In her long and restless life, she survived a suicide attempt, alcoholism, the death of her only child, and the long, slow mental and physical deterioration of her beloved fourth husband, the epidemiologist Winston Price.
