Curriculum Materials: Art in America
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Image 25 Grace Hartigan Questions: |
Billboard
Billboard is testimony to Hartigan's goal of making something beautiful from that which she considered vulgar and vital in modern life. Fascinated by American advertising, she began Billboard by selecting colorful images from Life magazine, which she then arranged on her wall. As she painted these images, she continued to invent, improvise, and expand upon her initial idea, not knowing what the final product would be. Moving clockwise from the upper left corner, Hartigan painted: a smiling face and toothpaste tube from an Ipana commercial; the neck of a wine bottle, a glass and a drinker; a Dole pineapple; peaches and whipped cream; an apple with a bite out of it; piano keys; lime jello with fruit; figure from a Campbell soup ad; and oranges.
With a wide variety of strong brushstrokes, vivid colors, and clever juxtapositions of forms, Hartigan infused these still images with the energy of a bustling city environment. By placing COMPLEMENTARY COLORS-reds and greens, blues and oranges-next to one another, she heightened their intensity. Many of the brushstrokes reveal Hartigan's gestures, an important element of action painting. She freely spread images, color, and brushstrokes across the painting's entire surface so that no one element dominated the others. This all-over composition is characteristic of abstract expressionism.
Hartigan's use of the advertising
imagery of mass culture in Billboard coincides with
the earliest stages of the American pop
art movement. Whereas many of the pop artists
intentionally adopted a detached attitude of noninvolvement
in their subjects, Hartigan
intentionally involves the viewer in her creative
experience, especially with her expressive brushwork.
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