Hartigan continued painting even after she developed hip trouble a few years ago and spent much of her time in a wheelchair.
Hers was a continual quest for artistic truth. When Hartigan was asked why she stopped creating works in a style that won her so much acclaim, she said that her abstract paintings "came too easily. I hadn't earned them."
For a while, the market for her work seemed to dry up. But, as is often the case, the art world eventually caught up with her. She found herself heralded as a pioneer of pop art - a style for which she had little sympathy.
"She once said, 'I'd prefer to be less of a star in a movement I love [meaning Abstract Expressionism] than a star in a movement I hate," said Costas Grimaldis, who owns the Baltimore gallery where Hartigan showed.
Grimaldis said that Hartigan got a "big chuckle" out of the Neo-Expressionists of the late 1970s and early 1980s, who "discovered" that they could combine recognizable human figures in abstract backgrounds.
"Her influence was felt even then," Grimaldis said.
In addition to her painting, Hartigan taught for 45 years at MICA.
"She really built the painting program from nowhere," said Fred Lazarus, MICA's president.
Stevens and Grimaldis say that Hartigan had the rare ability to put aside her predilections and help her students develop their own voices.
Grimaldis remembers with amusement a few painters who, under Hartigan's tutelage, discovered that their truest gift lay in a different genre. "Once or twice," he said, "the student who won the top award in MICA's painting program won it for a sculpture."
Lazarus likes to tell the story about how, when Hartigan was in her early 80s, she asked him to lunch. At the outing, she abruptly asked her boss: "Do you want me to quit? Because I don't plan to ever quit."
At the recollection, Lazarus laughs long and hard.
"That's the way it was," he says. "Grace was one of those people where, if you knew what was good for you, you didn't get in her way."
A few days before she died, Grimaldis visited his friend of 31 years in her bed at the nursing home. In his hand, he held an announcement for a small exhibit of Hartigan's works on paper that will debut at his gallery early next month. Nothing, he says, energized the artist more than a new show.
"She liked the announcement," he said. "This is how Grace would want to be remembered."
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