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Robert S. Mattison, Marshall R. Metzgar Professor of Art History, acted as a consultant and appears as a featured expert in a new documentary film on the American Abstract Expressionist painter Grace Hartigan. He is the author of the 1990 book Grace Hartigan: A Painter’s World about the artist’s life and work.
The film, Shattering Boundaries: Grace Hartigan. produced by Checkerboard Film Foundation and Shurefire Productions, follows Hartigan’s artistic career from the early stages as part of the New York School of artists in the 1940s and ’50s to her most recent work. The film premiered this summer at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City and the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and will soon be released to the public with a focus on academic uses.
Hartigan died Nov. 16 at age 86. “Her art was marked by a willingness to employ a variety of styles in a modernist idiom, to go back and forth from art-historical references to pop-culture references to autobiographical material,” Mattison says in an obituary in the New York Times today. Hartigan’s work has been featured in three exhibitions at the College. Lafayette awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1994.