Table of Contents

Contents

How I Came to Write This Book
Prologue: The Weekend That Changed Her Life

PART ONE: Escape Artist (1922-1944)
Chapter One: Dreaming
Chapter Two: Searching
Chapter Three: Learning

PART TWO: New York Adventure (1945-1949)
Chapter Four: Risking
Chapter Five: Connecting
Chapter Six: Coping

PART THREE: Rising Star (1950-1955)
Chapter Seven: Struggling
Chapter Eight: Launching
Chapter Nine: Succeeding
Chapter Ten: Asserting

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PART FOUR: Fame (1956-1960)
Chapter Eleven: Celebrating
Chapter Twelve: Swerving

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PART FIVE: Beginning Again in Baltimore (1961-2008)
Chapter Thirteen: Drifting
Chapter Fourteen: Teaching
Chapter Fifteen: Unraveling
Chapter Sixteen: Renewing
Chapter Seventeen: Prevailing

Acknowledgements
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Cathy Curtis is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer. She holds a master's degree in art history and is vice president of Biographers International Organization.

Reviews

"Today [Grace Hartigan's] name generally draws a blank. The drama of reading "Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter," Cathy Curtis's engaging and thorough biography, is waiting for the curtain of non-recognition to fall. When did it happen, and why? Was it because she was a woman? ... "Restless Ambition" doesn't settle those questions and certainly doesn't present Hartigan as a victim. Maybe that's because, as Ms. Curtis makes clear, Hartigan never saw
herself as a victim, even when she was a nobody; she saw herself rather as a woman of destiny, a Joan of Arc." --The Wall Street Journal
"In Cathy Curtis's new biography, we learn how Hartigan defied the standards for femininity prevalent during the 1940s and '50s to become a lasting example of the book's title, restless ambition... When we look at Grace Hartigan's paintings, we see how power does become a kind of beauty, though not everyone will say that about the artist herself. Perhaps, though, we need to keep looking. This biography helps us do that." --The Washington Post
"With impressive knowledge, empathy, and zesty language, Curtis has written her first book, the first biography of Grace Hartigan (1922-2008), a volatile and determined painter...With perceptiveness and vibrancy, Curtis powerfully conveys the passion, anguish, and intensity of Hartigan's life and work." --Booklist
"This spirited biography is the first to chart the career of Abstract Expressionist Hartigan (1922-2008), a painter with as much swagger as any of her male peers...an accessible portrait of a gutsy AbEx figure." --Publishers Weekly
"Restless Ambition is a great and easy read. It really peels back the onion about the Abstract Expressionist Movement, seen through the colorful life of one of its gritty female members." --Jim Levis, Levis Fine Art, New York
Cathy Curtis brings us a driven, determined, and dedicated Grace Hartigan who, as a rebellious young artist, attained a rare degree of success in the 1950s among the male abstract expressionist painters of the New York School. This expertly researched biography gives us a vivid, insightful, and fascinating glimpse into the world of the well-known artists and writers-including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Frank O'Hara-whom Hartigan knew so well."
--Laurie Lisle , author of Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe, and Louise Nevelson: A Passionate Life
"A fascinating look at the life of Grace Hartigan, a tough Abstract Expressionist woman artist who drank with the best of the men and had a sexual appetite that equaled the alcohol. Ambitious, driven and wrestling inner demons she abandons her only child for what she believed to be necessary for her life as an artist. Cathy Curtis deals with it all in her inclusive and well documented book."-- Audrey Flack
"The combination of [Hartigan's] life and her art as told in this biography makes for a fascinating book which fully justifies the author's passion for her subject...Read this book to learn of life as lived and art as made by a remarkable woman." --The Key Reporter, Svetlana Alpers
"At last, a life of the incomparable Grace! Cathy Curtis's biography is as colorful, tough-minded, and incisive as Hartigan's work at its best."--Patricia Albers, author of Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life
"Hartigan's life is well worth documenting and makes for compelling reading, encompassing as it does crossroads into wider cultural debates over the conflicted role women such as Hartigan faced as daughter, wife, mother, and lover while seeking to be an artist above all. Curtis gives readers as intimate a look as possible, drawing from numerous published sources, archives, and personal interviews." --Bookslut
"Curtis's biography captures the mute stubbornness involved in persisting with life despite its many disappointments." - London Review of Books