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
color plates
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
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.
"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
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