Grace Hartigan, the renowned artist and educator who died over the weekend at the age of 86, was a painter's painter.
"The thing that's been incredible is that one way or another, I've been able to arrange my life so that I could paint every day," she told The Sun in a 2001 interview. "I have great plans to live as long as Georgia O'Keeffe," she added. Ms. O'Keeffe lived to 98, and Ms. Hartigan said she needed the time because "there's a lot of work I still want to do."
Ms. Hartigan was not granted that wish, but what she accomplished over a career spanning more than six decades was little short of astonishing. She was not only a member of the pioneering group of New York Abstract-Expressionist painters who created America's first internationally important modern art movement, but she was also that group's foremost female member at a time when women artists were rarely taken seriously. She never achieved the fame of her friends Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, but they acknowledged her importance as a peer, and the art world eventually came to accept their judgment. Today, her works hang beside theirs in major museums around the world.