Hartigan kept a photograph of the Baltimore-born poet Frank O'Hara in the bedroom of her final studio, in Timonium, and he wrote several verses to Hartigan, his close friend. They include this lovely reflection: "Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible."
Though Hartigan never lacked self-confidence, she was a gimlet-eyed realist about her own career. In a 2006 interview, she said that she wasn't a genius on the order of Henri Matisse but was the next best thing: someone who could take a groundbreaking discovery and find in it unexpected ramifications.
"I think that history will place me with Franz Kline and Philip Guston," she said. "I will be considered a major female artist. I'm not enough of an innovator to be ranked with Pollock and de Kooning."
Hartigan's success is especially remarkable considering that she was largely self-taught. She was born in 1922 in Newark, N.J., the eldest of four children. She married for the first time right out of high school and never attended college.
During World War II, she got a job as a draftsman, where she learned the rudiments of drawing, and where, just as importantly, a co-worker introduced her to the works of Matisse. She moved to New York in 1945 and began painting full time three years later.
Her introduction to the world of artistic giants came when she phoned Pollock out of the blue one day to tell him how much she admired his work, and he invited her to visit his weekend home.
Hartigan had her first solo show in 1950, and just eight years later, she was the only woman included in a touring show called the New American Painters that electrified the international art world. She and her work were featured in spreads in Life and Newsweek; in the latter publication, Hartigan's photo was on the same page as an article about Judy Garland.
In 1960, when she was at the height of her career, she fell in love with Price, a research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University, married him and moved to Baltimore.
About that time, her art began to change in significant ways. Previously, she had painted the broad swaths of color that exemplified the second wave of Abstract Expressionism. When she began to add recognizable human figures to her drawings, many considered it heresy.
"She wasn't afraid to stop painting the type of work that was greatly admired by collectors and museums, and move on to a new style," Fisher says. "She worked tremendously hard, and her work continued to change and evolve. That wasn't true of all of her contemporaries."
