Grace Hartigan’s Portugal Street immediately arrests the viewer’s gaze with its rhythmic vertical rivulets of thinned brown paint over a pre-primed canvas with fields of brown, green, yellow, and blue hues and figurative line underpainting. Balancing subject and style, Hartigan explores the relationship between the image and the surface, developing out from the stifling absolutism of Abstract Expressionism where the primacy of the flat canvas as a color field to daringly include image and suggestions of pictorial depth. Figurative elements such as a feminine visage, a pair of crouched legs, and several ovular vases resting at the foreground of the canvas appear through the picture plane, mediated by the presence of the fine vertical lines—much like the presence of rain in Japanese woodblocks, the strong vertical linearity of these rivulets counterbalances the spatial suggestions inherent in her figurative underpainting, flattening the composition and consolidating the picture plane.

Portugal Street, a narrow two-block alleyway just above Hartigan’s Baltimore studio on Eastern Avenue, inspires several of the artist’s works. In this work, Hartigan, who after moving beyond Abstract Expressionism by enthusiastically copying then reinterpreting Old Masters, melds the demographic changes occurring to the Fells Prospect neighborhood, where many immigrants settled in the 1970s, and the forms of Matisse and particularly Picasso, whose stylized, flattened women in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon bear similarities to Hartigan’s figure in the upper right of the canvas. Describing her artistic philosophy, Hartigan wrote “no rules, I must be free to paint anything I feel” (G. Hartigan, quoted in William T. La Moy and Joseph P. McCaffrey eds., The Journals of Grace Hartigan, 1951–1955, Syracuse University Press, 2009, p. 30). In the present lot, we see Hartigan embrace this rebellious artistic attitude, stepping away from the specter of total abstraction and towards her art history series which would appear in the decades to come.