Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Influential New York School artist combines figuration and expressionist technique over four decades.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

An ever-changing artist who graduated from the New York School's abstract expressionism, Grace Hartigan went on to invent and explore a succession of personal idioms. From her joyous, extroverted 1950s abstractions, she jumped to procreative and psychosexual imagery in the '60s. During the next decade, coping with alcoholism, her husband's mental illness and her attempted suicide, she did chaotic paintings whose split images and obsessively crowded surfaces dealt with issues of life and death, sin and salvation. The '80s brought the somber, self-aware figures of her Saints and Martyrs series and the imaginary heroes of the Paper Doll series, hidden behind rivulets of dripping paint. A sense of menace lurks behind the kitsch and fun of her jazzy, audacious American Places series, which roves from Malibu to Chicago . Mattison, associate professor at Lafayette College, Pa., writes with deep feeling and insight about an underrated artist whose associates included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Frank O'Hara. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

This first monograph on Grace Hartigan vividly pictures and sensitively analyzes her art and life from the 1950s through the 1980s. Mattison has had a longtime involvement with Hartigan exhibition catalogs. His careful observations and thoughtful interpretations here are mostly focused on those works that are reproduced in the 100-plus illustrations (64 in color). A list of plates, chronology, selected bibliography, list of exhibitions, notes, and index are useful additions to the essay and the illustrations. This book should serve as a model for the kind of art-historical study that Mattison recommends be made of those other older contemporary artists (like Louise Bourgeois and Marisol) whose work has been eclipsed, as Hartigan's had, by the shifting tastes in art styles. Highly recommended to college and university students of American art, modern art, and women's art. G. Eager Bucknell University