Exhibition Details
This article appeared in the Review section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 12, 2003.
Grace Hartigan has been "painting art history" throughout her long career. ... Hartigan's paintings deliberately referring to art-historical precedents make up between one-third and one-half of her total oeuvre and have played an important role in the formation of her approach to painting as a whole. ... Art-history paintings continued to punctuate her work at critical times in each succeeding decade, signaling a change of direction, subject matter, and often style.
These are not paintings "from art history," nor are they paintings "about art history." Rather, in their borrowing, copying, and quoting from past works, these paintings are art history, living art that embodies the continuing and constant process of art making. Re-using poses, gestures, and compositions from past art, Hartigan adopts these signs and gives them new life, adding to them her own style (which often changes radically from one painting to another).
The results are works in which the borrowed subject adds to her style to provoke new content that, while evoking the potency and residual meaning of the past work, simultaneously encourages us to see it—to "read" it -- as a completely different work. As Hartigan "paints art history," on a multitude of different levels, so also do we engage it.
The images are from the exhibition "Grace Hartigan: Painting Art History," at Dickinson College through November 1. The text is by the exhibition's curator, Sharon L. Hirsh, a professor of art and art history at Dickinson, from the exhibition catalog. The exhibition will be at the Maryland Institute College of Art November 14 through December 14.
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