"Grace Hartigan's Grand Street Brides: The Modern Bride as Mannequin" (original) (raw)

Woman's Art Journal, Fall/Winter 2013, vol. 34, no. 2

Figures (5)

Fig. 1. Grace Hartigan, Grand Street Brides (1954), oil on canvas, 72 9/16" x 102 3/8". Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of an anonymous donor 55.27. Photo: Geoffrey Clements. By Aliza Edelman

Fig. 1. Grace Hartigan, Grand Street Brides (1954), oil on canvas, 72 9/16" x 102 3/8". Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of an anonymous donor 55.27. Photo: Geoffrey Clements. By Aliza Edelman

Fig. 2. Walter Silver, Bridal Shop Window on Grand Street in New York (c. 1954), gelatin silver print. Grace Hartigan Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library Matador series from the early 1950s she played with sexual identity through the articulation of the human form while elusively displaying the artist-as-model, who either acquired the guise of a male toreador or an espada, or as viewed in her seated portrait The Persian Jacket, where the strictly formal gesture and pose are reminiscent of Velazquez’s Pope Innocent X (c. 1650). Hartigan was certainly not alone in her presentation of a creative identity imagined from multiple and referential sources, or in her playful, if not camp appropriation of the name George, as she was readily encouraged in this strategy through her personal and professional intimacies in the early and mid-fifties with the artist Larry Rivers and the poet and critic Frank O’Hara.* While Terence Diggory frames Hartigan’s experiences “through the lens of a gay sensibility,” it is equally important to consider the function of contemporary characterizations of womanhood and the perception of merging gender roles.’ Along with fashionable discourse on the Modern Bride, countless studies investigated the topic of the Modern Woman’s Dilemma, also known as the Woman’s Problem or the Woman’s Question.”” Women’s identification with multiple roles and ambiguous models of womanhood, along with the appearance of their adoption of masculine behavior, invoked the frequent use—especially in the behavior of professional career women—of the postwar terms “masculinism” and “feminine ascendency.” These terms implied directed, successful, and authoritative women who, in their rejection of feminine, domestic, or biological roles, were portrayed as imitating men. Prewar notions of femininity and domesticity gradually transformed to include greater responsibilities outside the home; yet professional “lifestyles” for women were complicated by the social expectations of marital relationships

Fig. 2. Walter Silver, Bridal Shop Window on Grand Street in New York (c. 1954), gelatin silver print. Grace Hartigan Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library Matador series from the early 1950s she played with sexual identity through the articulation of the human form while elusively displaying the artist-as-model, who either acquired the guise of a male toreador or an espada, or as viewed in her seated portrait The Persian Jacket, where the strictly formal gesture and pose are reminiscent of Velazquez’s Pope Innocent X (c. 1650). Hartigan was certainly not alone in her presentation of a creative identity imagined from multiple and referential sources, or in her playful, if not camp appropriation of the name George, as she was readily encouraged in this strategy through her personal and professional intimacies in the early and mid-fifties with the artist Larry Rivers and the poet and critic Frank O’Hara.* While Terence Diggory frames Hartigan’s experiences “through the lens of a gay sensibility,” it is equally important to consider the function of contemporary characterizations of womanhood and the perception of merging gender roles.’ Along with fashionable discourse on the Modern Bride, countless studies investigated the topic of the Modern Woman’s Dilemma, also known as the Woman’s Problem or the Woman’s Question.”” Women’s identification with multiple roles and ambiguous models of womanhood, along with the appearance of their adoption of masculine behavior, invoked the frequent use—especially in the behavior of professional career women—of the postwar terms “masculinism” and “feminine ascendency.” These terms implied directed, successful, and authoritative women who, in their rejection of feminine, domestic, or biological roles, were portrayed as imitating men. Prewar notions of femininity and domesticity gradually transformed to include greater responsibilities outside the home; yet professional “lifestyles” for women were complicated by the social expectations of marital relationships

Fig. 3. Martha Boss as bridal model in “The $3 Billion Wedding Business,” Life, June 9, 1952, front cover. Photo by Leonard McCombe.

Fig. 3. Martha Boss as bridal model in “The $3 Billion Wedding Business,” Life, June 9, 1952, front cover. Photo by Leonard McCombe.

Fig. 4. Models show ready-made underpinnings in “The $3 Billion Wedding Business,” Life, June 9, 1952, p. 119. Photo by Leonard McCombe.

Fig. 4. Models show ready-made underpinnings in “The $3 Billion Wedding Business,” Life, June 9, 1952, p. 119. Photo by Leonard McCombe.

Fig. 5. Walter Silver, Grace Hartigan Painting Bride and Owl with Marian Jim (c 1954), gelatin silver print. Grace Hartigan Papers, Special Collect- ions Research Center, Syracuse University Library.

Fig. 5. Walter Silver, Grace Hartigan Painting Bride and Owl with Marian Jim (c 1954), gelatin silver print. Grace Hartigan Papers, Special Collect- ions Research Center, Syracuse University Library.

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