Grace Hartigan's Billboard Introduction About the Art Abstract Expressionism Style and Technique The Artist Look ~ Discuss ~ Explore Activities Glossary Text Only Teacher's Guide Grace Hartigan American, born 1922 Billboard, 1957 Oil on canvas, 78 1/2 x 111 inches The Julia B. Bigelow Fund by John Bigelow 57.35 About the Art Do you remember what you saw on your way to school or work today? Maybe you noticed an interesting shape as you passed a store window, the color of a poster at the bus stop, or the patterns made by the lines in the road. Every minute of every day-as we ride to work, watch television, or read a magazine-thousands of images surround us. These images from everyday life are the subject of Grace Hartigan's painting Billboard Drawing on her experiences in New York in the 1950s, Hartigan incorporated familiar elements of urban America into her work. In this painting, the fragments of figures and forms recall billboard images seen fleetingly from the highway. In Billboard Hartigan structured seemingly chaotic images into a unified and ordered composition. She believes that "the rawness must be resolved into form and unity; without the 'rage for order' how can there be art?" Using vivid colors and bold, dynamic brushstrokes, she infused the forms with energy and life, arranging them by size and intensity of color to balance the composition. No part of this painting seems to hold our attention longer than another; our eye wanders from one bright color and interesting shape to the next. Hartigan achieved this effect mainly through the careful use of complementary colors--red and green, blue and orange, yellow and purple. She believes that "you should be able to enter a painting like a promenade--that you should be able to walk in anywhere and walk out anywhere." Abstract Expressionism After World War II, America emerged as a great world leader and New York replaced Paris as the art center of the Western world. A group of New York artists called Abstract Expressionists captured the speed, energy, and power of American life with a new way of painting. Their spontaneous, gestural style, known as action painting, often revealed the raw physical vigor of the creative process. The application of the paint became their subject, as they slashed, spattered, spilled, and splashed it onto their canvases. Soon younger artists flocked to New York to become part of the New York School. They adopted the energetic, gestural style of the older Abstract Expressionists but turned from purely abstract art to recognizable subjects--landscapes, still lifes, and figures. Grace Hartigan belongs to this "second generation" of Abstract Expressionists. Style and Technique Hartigan employs both abstraction and figuration, refusing to see them as mutually exclusive. Inspired by subjects encountered in daily life, she combines abstract and representational forms to create paintings of great visual and emotional power. She describes her subjects as real, but not realistic. Hartigan drew repeatedly on the accessible imagery and boldly simplified style of American advertising. In Billboard we glimpse a smiling face above a tube of Ipana toothpaste, the neck of a wine bottle poised over a glass, molded lime Jell-O surrounded by fruit, and the keys of a piano. She began the painting by cutting images from Life magazine and pinning them up on the wall in the form of a collage; then she painted the remaining background purple. This collage of commercial, mechanical, and urban imagery became the model for her painting. "I have found my 'subject,'" she said, "it concerns that which is vulgar and vital in American modern life, and the possibilities of its transcendence into the beautiful." The fragmentary images in Billboard are arranged into an ordered composition unified by Hartigan's bold, expressive brushwork and balanced by her placement of the colors on the canvas. For instance, the large rectangle of purple on the right is balanced by a smaller square of yellow (purple's complement) on the left. The red of the circular apple is intensified by the surrounding green (red's complement). The same green is repeated in the lower right corner, where it takes on a different appearance next to the analogous colors of blue and darker green. The Artist Grace Hartigan was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1922. After high school she moved to Los Angeles, where she took her first drawing class. In 1942 she returned to New Jersey and studied mechanical drafting. It was wartime, and she worked in an airplane factory, painting watercolor still lifes in her spare time. In 1945 Hartigan moved to New York to be in the center of the art world. She was one of the first young artists to admire Abstract Expressionism at a time when few took contemporary American art seriously. Greatly influenced by the Abstract Expressionists, she quickly absorbed their spontaneous, abstract style, but she also became interested in the works of the European old masters, such as Raphael, Rubens, and Caravaggio. In 1959 the Museum of Modern Art in New York sent an exhibition called "The New American Painting" to eight European countries. Only one woman was included in this famous exhibition--Grace Hartigan. In the 1960s Hartigan moved to Baltimore, where she still lives and paints. Look, Discuss, Explore Look Lead the students through the following exercise: Look closely at the painting. What do you see? How many objects can you identify? Where do you see them? Have the students work as a group to list everything they see in the painting. Look for the Ipana toothpaste smile, wine bottle (only the neck is visible) and glass, Dole pineapples, peaches and whipped cream, apple with a bite taken out, piano keys, lime Jell-O mold with fruit, figure from a soup ad, and oranges. Let the students come up with their own ideas and observations. Grace Hartigan said: "A line is like a lasso. You throw it over your head and you grab something. . . . It's like writing. You can read a line in a painting almost the way you can read a word." Examine the use of line in this painting. Where has the artist used line to outline? (glass and wine bottle). Where do you find straight lines? (toothpaste tube). Where do you find a series of lines? (piano keys). Where do you see lines that are curved? squiggly? jagged? thin? thick? Discuss how different lines evoke different responses (speed, movement, aggressiveness, passivity). Ask the students to choose a color. Where is the largest shape of that color? the smallest? What colors surround it? Does the color appear to change? (Does the red of the apple look the same as the red of the lips on the face?) If it appears to change, discuss why (size, shape, surrounding colors, intensity). Discuss the use of complementary colors (red and green, yellow and purple, blue and orange). Where do you see two complementary colors together? What size and shape are they? Which is bigger? Which is brighter? Is the color composed of one large shape or many smaller shapes? (Complementary colors appear intensified when placed next to each other.) Hartigan began Billboard by making a collage of flat, overlapping images taken from Life magazine. How is the painting similar to a collage? How is it different? Study the illusion of depth in this painting. Does the painting appear flat, or does it appear to have depth? Are there colors that appear to recede or advance? Discuss the use of cool colors (blue, green, purple) and warm colors (red, orange, yellow). How do the colors affect the impression of depth? Discuss Ask the students to name the first thing they noticed in the painting. What drew your eye to that section of the painting? Was it the color? the shape? the size? Did everyone notice the same thing? Discuss the reasons for so many different answers. (There is no main focal point. Grace Hartigan wanted us to see all the parts as equal, and she filled the entire canvas with bold, exciting shapes and colors.) Ask the students what feelings this painting evokes. Do you feel delighted? confused? surprised? Talk about their reactions. What is it about the painting that makes you feel that way? Is it the colors? the shapes? the way it's painted? Grace Hartigan titled her painting Billboard. How is this painting similar to a billboard or sign? How is it different? If this were an advertisement, what product or service would it advertise? What makes you think so? If there were advertising text to go with Billboard, what would it say? Explore Ask students to imagine they can hear this painting. What sounds do you hear? Where are they coming from? Are they loud? soft? harmonious? Do you hear a single sound? many ounds at once? Discuss why the painting "sounds" the way it does. Grace Hartigan believes that "you should be able to enter a painting like a promenade--that you should be able to walk in anywhere and walk out anywhere." Ask the students to imagine that they can walk around in this painting. Where would you go? Why? Now ask them to pretend that they can only walk on the blue sections. Which parts of the painting could you travel to? How does it feel there? Is it warm? cool? moist? hard? soft? Discuss cool colors (blues, greens, and purples) and warm colors (reds, oranges, and yellows). Grace Hartigan said: "I am assaulted, as we all are, by images. One cannot eradicate those images as one walks through time and life." Ask the students how images seen in the course of everyday life affect them. Did you ever want to buy something because of an advertisement? What was so persuasive about the ad? Where did you see the ad? Who were you with? What were you doing? How do all those factors affect how we see? Point out how many different types of images we are exposed to every day through newspapers, magazines, signs, television, computers, etc. How would life be different without those images? Did a billboard or sign ever make you laugh, or make you angry? What was the image or message that made you respond that way? Grace Hartigan said: "I do not wish to describe my subject matter, or reflect upon it--I want to distill it until I have its essence." Discuss the meaning of the word essence. What qualities cause a thing to be itself? Discuss the essence of a chair. What makes it a chair? What can you take away from it without taking away its essence? How has Grace Hartigan conveyed the essence of New York City in her painting Billboard? Activities Many activities are suitable for several disciplines. The following icons are used throughout the Activities section to note specific interdisciplinary activities. Elementary Language Arts Secondary Science Art Social Studies Art Grace Hartigan's use of color in Billboard is bold and expressive. Working with various color combinations she assembled the colors into a balanced composition of complementary and analogous colors. Create a Color Lab Set up a color lab so students can explore color combinations. Supply paints, soft crayons, colored transparent cellophane, or other mixable media. Ask the students to experiment with the three primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) to find formulas for the secondary colors (green, purple, and orange) and the tertiary colors (blue-green, yellow-orange, red-purple, etc.). Have them add white to the colors to create tints and black to create shades. Have the students formulate a hypothesis, conduct experiments, record their findings, and draw conclusions based on the results. For instance, ask them to record how many drops of yellow must be added (one drop at a time) to ten drops of blue in order to make green. How many drops of blue must be added to ten drops of yellow to make green? Were the yellow and blue mixed in equal amounts? Did everyone come up with the same formula? Discuss. Have the students experiment with complementary colors. Ask them to add one drop of red to ten drops of green. How did the red change the green? What happens when you mix equal amounts of red and green? Explore Color Intensity Have the students make two squares out of red construction paper, each 1 x 1 inch. Then have them place one red square in the middle of a 3 x 3-inch square of green and the other in a 3 x 3-inch square of orange. Discuss how the background colors change the appearance of the red. Try many different color combinations. Explore Color Balance Have the students place a 1 x 1-inch red square on one side of a large sheet of white paper. To balance the red square, have them cut a green square (any size) and place it on the paper opposite the red one. What size did you make the green square? Was it the same size as the red square? smaller? larger? Experiment with various color combinations. Create Variations on a Color Challenge the students to create their own color variation study. Ask them to pick one primary color and paint a simple composition using only that color and its complementary color. Then have them paint the same composition using the same primary color and its analogous colors. Have them repeat the composition a third time, using the primary color, tints (additions of white), and shades (additions of black) to create a monochromatic painting. Then ask them to do the same composition a fourth time, as a value study. They may use as many different colors as they like, but all must be of the same value or intensity. Compare and contrast the four compositions. Discuss what happens to the primary color in each color variation study. Create a Mood: City Expressions Billboard expresses the mood of New York City in the 1950s, when Grace Hartigan lived and worked there. Hartigan worked out the composition for Billboard by making a collage of images taken from Life magazine. Start with a discussion of collage technique and the principles of collage (overlapping, balance, repetition, contrast). Ask the students to construct a collage that expresses the mood of the place where they live. They can do this as a group or individually. What objects might express the feel of the town or city? What kinds of lines, shapes, and colors will convey the mood? Have the students create a painting using their collage as a model. Discuss how the painting and the collage are similar. Discuss how they are different. Create the Abstract To create the forms in Billboard, Grace Hartigan took naturalistic, or realistic, images from Life magazine and abstracted them--that is, she kept the object's basic shape and color but left out the small details. Instruct students to take a common object, a chair for example, and abstract it. Discuss the basic form and color of the object. Then have the students draw or paint it in an abstract manner--leaving out details, simplifying, exaggerating, and changing various elements. Explore the Essence Grace Hartigan wished to distill the essence of her subject matter. Discuss the meaning of essence and how Grace Hartigan has conveyed the essence of New York City in Billboard. (Also see Explore, p. 8.) Ask the students to draw the essence of an object, such as a chair. How do you convey the object's essence? What must you include in the drawing? What can you leave out? Is the essence more than just what you see? What other senses are involved? How has Grace Hartigan conveyed the essence of New York City in Billboard? Suggested Reading Cole, Alison. Eyewitness Art: Color. New York: Dorling Kindersley, in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1993. Frayling, Christopher; Helen Frayling; and Ron Van der Meer. The Art Pack. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. Yenawine, Philip. Key Art Terms for Beginners. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995. Language Arts Grace Hartigan's association with avant-garde writers and musicians in New York helped her develop her own style in painting. The poet Frank O'Hara was a close friend of Hartigan's. He wrote many poems for her, and she included him in several of her paintings. Create a Story Ask the students to make up a story based on Billboard. Have them describe the characters and objects and devise a plot based on what they see in the painting. Discuss their various story ideas. Create a Commercial Ask the students to write a commercial based on the painting. Have them pretend it is for the New York City Chamber of Commerce, to attract tourists to the city.   Create a Poem Hartigan took many of the images for Billboard from Life magazine. Ask the students to page through a popular magazine aimed at a specific audience, such as Gourmet or Sports Illustrated. Have them make a list of colors and images that bombard their senses. Then have them list words that capture the essence of those images. Compare and contrast their lists, looking for repetition, juxtaposition, opposites, and patterns. Ask the students to write a poem with the words from their own list or from a list generated by the entire class.   Create a Catalogue Poem A catalogue is a list of related items. Some writers (Walt Whitman, for example) use catalogues as a literary device. Billboard can be thought of as a visual catalogue of New York--colorful, energetic, confusing, noisy, and commercialized. Read poetry that contains a catalogue, such as passages from Whitman's "Song of Myself," and then ask the students to write their own catalogue poem. Have them write down a list of words that express their feelings about their community and then use the list to create a poem. Ask them to research a particular place and time, such as New York City in the 1950s, and use their findings to create a catalogue poem. Compare and contrast the catalogue of their own community with that of the place they researched. Read and Create Cities and towns, like people, have personalities. Some are warm and friendly, while others are cold and distant. Ask the students to read a work such as Thornton Wilder's Our Town, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, or John Steinbeck's Cannery Row. Discuss the place described in the story and prepare a sketch or collage that captures its essence. Discuss the poem "The Day Lady Died" or another work by Frank O'Hara. Which words, in particular, capture the essence of New York in the 1950s? How is his poem similar to Hartigan's Billboard? Another poet who often wrote about life in New York was Langston Hughes. Discuss "Dream Boogie," "Juke Box Love Song," "Good Morning," or another of Hughes's poems. Discuss how these poems reflect the times and compare and contrast them with Billboard. Look for Words Have the students select specific words from one of Frank O'Hara's poems (muggy, balance, keyboard, whisper) or some other literary work. Ask the students to find the particular part of the painting that best describes or captures the essence of each word. Discuss. Sources Lange, Art, and Nathaniel Mackey, eds. Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1993. Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara. The Pocket Series, No. 19. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996. Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. Vintage Classics Edition. New York: Random House, 1990. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. This collection of poems, first published in 1885, is available today in several editions, and selections from Whitman's work are included in many anthologies. Music While living and working in New York, Grace Hartigan developed a lasting interest in jazz. Her art reflects the syncopated rhythms and improvisational style of 1950s modern jazz. She often went to the famous New York jazz club The Five Spot to hear jazz artists like Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. Listen and Look Make a cassette tape of 30-second samplings of musical selections by jazz aritsts such as Monk, Davis, and Coltrane. Avoid music with lyrics or very familiar recordings--they already have associations. Have the students quietly look at the painting as they listen. After each selection, ask them what part of the painting they noticed. What areas, colors, and shapes were observed and how did the music influence their perceptions? (Did the slower music draw attention to the large, broad, dark areas? Did the fast music draw attention to the small, bright sections of the painting?) Discuss. Compare visual elements to musical elements. Discuss how they are similar and different. Explore form, tonal and visual color, rhythm pattern and beat, dynamics, and melodic phrases and contours. Listen to the same selections of music and ask the students to "draw" the music. How does the drawing of a slow lyrical tune differ from the drawing of a fast, staccato tune? Express through Abstraction Grace Hartigan's abstraction of images in Billboard, to express her feelings about life in New York in the 1950s, has a parallel in the way jazz artists of the time expressed themselves through music. First play the song "My Favorite Things," from the musical The Sound of Music, and then play John Coltrane's version of the same song (Atlantic 1960). How does John Coltrane improvise on, or abstract, the melody? How does he change the original melody? Can you still recognize it? Does he use the same instruments? Is the tempo slower or faster? How does each version make you feel? Which version do you like better? Why? Discuss how Grace Hartigan has abstracted familiar images such as bottles, faces, and fruit. How is the improvisation on the song "My Favorite Things" similar to the abstraction in Billboard? Discuss how music and art are similar. Some words to get the discussion started are spontaneous, fast, loose, free, large, colorful, and loud. Discuss how John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" and Grace Hartigan's Billboard reflect life in New York in the 1950s. Ask the students to take a well-known song and improvise their version on a musical instrument. For example, they might use a different rhythm, change the tempo, repeat a single pattern several times, use fewer chords, or play longer melody lines. Play the Painting Have the students look closely at Billboard and improvise a musical composition, either as a group or individually. Ask them to think about creating a beginning, middle, and end to the composition. Ask them to match specific sounds to things they see in the painting, such as low broad sounds for the larger areas, and high, light sounds for the bright areas. Social Studies Grace Hartigan began Billboard by creating a collage of images taking from Life magazine. The images expressed, or captured the essence of, the world around her-New York City in the 1950s. Create a Collage about You Myself collage Ask the students to create a collage that reveals something about themselves, such as their favorite foods, sports activities, hobbies, and places to visit. Family collage Ask the students to create a collage that highlights their family. Community collage Ask the students to create a collage that depicts their community. It could include various community services, such as the fire department, police department, and schools. It could also include places for recreation, such as parks, movie theaters, and shopping centers. Explore the Community Ask the students to research a community, county, state, or country and identify its population, major products, natural resources, and attractions. Then have them use this information to create a billboard such as a Chamber of Commerce or tourist office might use to promote the area. Have the students use maps, brochures, and collected information to create a collage that conveys the essence of a particular place and time, such as New York in the 1950s. Each student could be assigned a particular topic to investigate, such as census figures, ethnic composition, politics, art, or industry. Have the students create a collage that reflects events that occurred in New York in the 1950s and a collage that reflects events that have occurred in Minneapolis and St. Paul in the 1990s. Compare the collages and discuss what they have in common and how they differ. Based on changes over the past forty years, project future changes. Picture Your Community Have the students do a photographic study that captures the personality of a particular community or neighborhood. Make a collage from the photographs. Look into History Event Ask the students to create a collage that captures the essence of an event, such as the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression, the 1950s, or the Vietnam War. Biography Have the students create a collage that captures the essence of a famous person's life (for example, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Florence Nightingale, or Henry VIII). Science Explore Color in Living Organisms Grace Hartigan used bright, bold colors to express her feelings about her environment. Discuss the purpose of color in living organisms, for example, warning (peacock), attraction (cardinal), and camouflage (chameleon). Using color as a theme, have the students make a collage from images of different plants and animals. Grace Hartigan balanced her composition through careful placement of the colors. She intensified colors by placing them next to their complementary colors (a red apple against a green background) and de-emphasized colors by placing them next to similar, or analogous, colors (red lips against an orange face). Discuss complementary colors in nature, such as an apple tree with pink blossoms, unripe green apples, and ripe red apples. Discuss the purpose of these colors in nature. Study Line and Shape in Crystals Have the students grow crystals from various formulas. Let them examine the crystals' shapes and lines through a hand lens or a stereoscope, and ask them to draw what they see. Are shapes repeated? How? What kinds of lines are there? Sugar crystals (rock candy) Prepare a supersaturated sugar mixture by heating distilled water and slowly adding sugar (C11H22O11) to the water until no more will dissolve. Fill clean glass jars about one-fourth full of the solution. Hang a cotton string, the thicker the better, from the center of the jar opening to the bottom of the jar. Loosely cover the jar and place it in an undisturbed place. Watch giant sugar crystals grow over the next week. The crystals are edible. Epsom salts paint Prepare a 3:1 mixture of water to Epsom salts (MgSO4) and add it to different colors of water-soluble paint. With a brush, apply these Epsom salts paints to white construction paper. Be sure to rinse the brush well and dry it before dipping it into a new color. Let the paint dry thoroughly and observe the crystals. Math Through her paintings, Grace Hartigan wanted to create balance and order in a chaotic world, just as mathematics imposes order in the world of infinite numbers. Look for Math in Art Ask the students to find examples in the painting, note the location, and make sketches of the following: symmetry and asymmetry geometric shapes perspective and overlapping parallel lines and perpendicular lines Create Art with Geometry Ask the students to make a drawing of the painting Billboard using only straight lines, circles, triangles, squares, rectangles, and other geometric shapes. For example, the green Jell-O mold becomes a triangle, and the surrounding red fruits become small circles. Discuss how the drawings differ from the painting. Discuss how they are similar to it. Are the drawings balanced? If so, how? Are shapes repeated? Where? Do shapes overlap? Where? What is the effect when one shape overlaps another? Click here for glossary of terms.   Further Reading Mattison, Robert Saltonstall. Grace Hartigan: A Painter's World. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990. Rubinstein, Charlotte Streifer. American Women Artists. New York: Avon Books, 1982. Acknowledgments For developing the interdisciplinary activities, thanks are due Ted Kotsonas, Richfield High School (retired), Richfield, Minnesota; Mary Witkis, South High School, Minneapolis; and the following members of the Institute's Teachers Advisory Committee: Joanna Cortright, Linwood A+ School, St. Paul; Mike Dronen, Olson Middle School, Minneapolis; and Virginia Wheeler, Burnsville Senior High School, Burnsville, Minnesota.