Nov 17, 2022 - Sale 2622

Sale 2622 - Lot 33

Price Realized: $ 4,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
GRACE HARTIGAN
This So-Called Angel.

Color screenprint on Hahnemühle paper, 1960. 440x357 mm; 17 1/2x14 1/4 inches, full margins. The deluxe edition of 23, aside from the book edition of 200. Signed, dated "61", inscribed "Special Edition" and numbered 5/23 in pencil, lower margin. Published by Tiber Press, New York. A superb, richly-inked impression with strong colors.

Hartigan (1922-2008) was among the foremost female artists of the Abstract Expressionists--along with Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler--and a centerpiece of the New York school that included friends Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Frankenthaler, Willem and Elaine de Kooning and Franz Kline. She was the only woman artist in The MoMA's seminal 1958-59 exhibition "The New American Painting" which visited eight European countries over the course of a year, showcasing 17 different American artists and altering European perception of American art.

During the 1960s, she relocated to Baltimore and, from 1965, worked at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she was the director of the Hoffberger Graduate School of Painting.

Hartigan produced this and several other color screenprints to accompany three poems written by James Schuyler in 1960 and published in an illustrated volume by Tiber Press, New York. Each image was titled with a phrase from a poem that emphasized Hartigan's inspiration in the visual quality of the poem's imagery.