Little Junk Shop

Grace Hartigan (1922 – 2008) was a significant member of the second generation New York School. She moved from New Jersey to New York City in 1945, after training in mechanical drafting, and was deeply influenced by the work of Jackson Pollock. Her early large-scale abstractions resembled those of Pollock and Willem de Kooning. In the early 1950s, she began introducing representational objects into her paintings, did a series of variations of Old Master paintings, and collaborated with the poet Frank O’Hara on twelve poem/paintings entitled Oranges. Her vibrant images of city street life—shop windows, still lifes, and portraits—were painted in her characteristic gestural style. Some critics have described her as a proto-Pop artist because of her use of imagery drawn from popular culture.

Critics and curators embraced her work early in her career. She was included in such important exhibitions as New Talent (1950) at the Kootz Gallery organized by Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro, as well as the seminal Museum of Modern Art exhibitions 12 Americans (1954) and The New American Painting (1958-59). In 1958 Life magazine called her “the most celebrated of the young American women painters.”

Hartigan moved to Baltimore in 1959 and later joined the faculty of the Maryland Institute College of Art. She became the director of the graduate program, the Hoffberger School of Painting, in 1965. Her later works alternated between colorfully stained and thickly painted canvases. Ye Olde Junk Shop (1993) falls into the former category. Loose black brushstrokes outline the overlapping figures and objects depicted. A typewriter is highlighted by its central location and the surrounding swathes of purple. Other areas of the canvas are washed with bright blue, red, and yellow further enlivening the already lively scene. The layering suggests the view through a store’s front window into the shop where several people wander between the stacked contents. In this whimsical painting, Hartigan captures the joys of shopping for junk in laden spaces where treasures are often buried.