Oral History Interview with Grace Hartigan, 1979 May 10
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Oral history interview with Grace Hartigan, 1979 May 10 Funding for the digital preservation of this interview was provided by a grant from the Save America's Treasures Program of the National Park Service. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Grace Hartigan on May 10, 1979. The interview took place in Baltimore, Maryland, and was conducted by Julie Haifley for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Interview JULIE HAIFLEY: I thought I'd start with your childhood, just a little bit. In Cindy Nemser's interview, I think that you said that your parents expected you to be different because of the way you were as a child. Were you a first- born child? I wondered if you thought that had anything to do with it? GRACE HARTIGAN: Probably, yes. Until I was five years old or seven years old, we lived in a two-family house with my Irish grandmother and my aunt, who was a school teacher. I spent as much time with them as I did with my mother and father. My aunt tried to be a writer, she would make up stories. I was talking when I was two years old. I never stopped. And my grandmother had an enormous number of folk stories to tell me and Irish songs and Welsh songs. So that was extremely encouraging to an imaginative little girl. Then I was precociously bright and I just thought, as my parents did - they didn't know I was going to be an artist - but I'm sure they always thought I was something different. When I was a child, there weren't roles available for women then in the arts, really. The most imaginative thing they could think of would be a school teacher, which is what my aunt was. JULIE HAIFLEY: An art teacher, perhaps? GRACE HARTIGAN: Yes, but art didn't go into it. It was writing and stories, theater - as a matter of fact, theater was the thing I was involved with through high school, not art at all. I was going to be an actress. JULIE HAIFLEY: You did think about becoming an actress? GRACE HARTIGAN: Oh, yes. So the influence of my grandmother and my aunt was extremely important to me. Then I had pneumonia for a year and at that time they didn't have penicillin, and I was in bed and then taught myself how to read. JULIE HAIFLEY: You weren't tutored? GRACE HARTIGAN: No, I just did it all by myself, with my aunt. She died soon afterwards, when I was about seven, but she was an English teacher. And then we moved to what then was almost a country town in New Jersey, Melbourne. It's a big suburban community now, but then there were lots of fields, and my great love - gypsies - would camp near the house. I'd sit in an apple tree and watch them. They came with caravans and horses and built bonfires outside and cooked over the fires in big black pots, just like romantic movies and stories. They really did it. I watched them all the time. The women would come around in marvelous long skirts, brilliant colors, and big earrings, and tell fortunes. The men would sharpen knives. JULIE HAIFLEY: Was it a seasonal kind of thing? GRACE HARTIGAN: Oh, they would travel around according to weather. I mean they'd be going on south, probably, from there but usually in the spring because I remember the apple trees were in blossom then. JULIE HAIFLEY: Did the same groups come? GRACE HARTIGAN: Oh, no, you'd never know which was which. There were just regular routes they would travel. Now they go around in Cadillacs! But then, it was really wonderful. JULIE HAIFLEY: But you didn't get to know anyone in particular? GRACE HARTIGAN: Oh, no, because we were forbidden to play with the children. And why we were told we were going to be stolen when all those gypsies had so many children of their own is beyond my imagination. It was strictly forbidden. JULIE HAIFLEY: You have one brother? GRACE HARTIGAN: I have a brother and two sisters. JULIE HAIFLEY: When did they come along? GRACE HARTIGAN: Oh, decently spaced, about two and a half years. The sister that I'm really closest to is my youngest sister, and she says she just spent her childhood trying to trap me from escaping. JULIE HAIFLEY: Trying to run away? GRACE HARTIGAN: Yes, trying to escape the kids, climb up the apple tree and watch the gypsies. I had a very interesting public school life in Melbourne, New Jersey, which I haven't mentioned much. They taught French, for instance, beginning in second grade. So I studied French from second grade until I graduated from high school. And it was a public school! An extraordinary English department and drama department in both elementary school and in the high school. And beginning as a freshman in high school, I was in every school play that there was, the lead in every play. I was going to be an actress. JULIE HAIFLEY: Did you study acting? GRACE HARTIGAN: Just with this marvelous English teacher who was the drama teacher. And I acted at the Papermill Playhouse, which is a professional theater, when I was in high school, had a bit part. And I won the prize in high school for the most talented, not in art, giving Maxwell Anderson's "Elizabeth the Queen." JULIE HAIFLEY: Were you taking art classes at all at that time? In public school? GRACE HARTIGAN: No. Oh, I did for a while. I'm terribly clumsy and they were making us copy calendars, and I couldn't get that girl to smile right. I just got so discouraged I didn't do it any more. I kept a journal, a diary, as girls do, and I drew in it; just fanciful things. But I never studied. So the idea of being an artist never entered my head all through school. So you may ask, "Well, then, what happened?" JULIE HAIFLEY: Well, right. Well, you were married right out of high school, weren't you? GRACE HARTIGAN: Yes. My home life was quite... My mother and father were quarrelsome and as I got to be an adolescent my liberal views conflicted terribly with their very conservative, middle-class views, and it was just a constant fight. And I married the first boy that read poetry to me. (Laughter) JULIE HAIFLEY: Did you go to California then or... GRACE HARTIGAN: Then we got married. My mother and father suffered terribly from the American Depression in the '30s. My father worked in a bank and he took salary cut after salary cut. The poor kids...it was just a nightmare. My mother was a very bad manager and at the end of the month we'd just eat corn flakes for a whole week. JULIE HAIFLEY: Really? GRACE HARTIGAN: Yes. I got a scholarship to go to a little college in New Jersey, but they couldn't afford to clothe me. I had one dress. So I went to work at an insurance company in downtown Newark, New Jersey, and I met Bob Jachens, who was the first college dropout that I'd ever heard of. He'd been going to Columbia, he was a brilliant boy, he entered Columbia when he was sixteen, I think. Graduated from high school when he was fifteen. After a couple of years he dropped out. We were working in the insurance company and fell in love. That was the first time I was conscious of art - he took me to the Metropolitan. I was eighteen. JULIE HAIFLEY: And that was the first time you'd been there? GRACE HARTIGAN: Yes. My parents had absolutely no consciousness of it. In fact, my mother was so antagonistic to anything like that that if I would listen to an opera on the radio, she'd come in and turn it off. It was interesting because it made me feel as though I had a private life, something to fight for. It was very different, it was forbidden, maybe kind of magical. And so Bob and I got married. I was eighteen and he was twenty. And we decided we were going to be pioneers, going to go to Alaska and be pioneers. We were really hippies for that time, 1940, very revolutionary. We took a bus all the way from New York to Los Angeles where I found out I was pregnant. We said, "That's all right. Pioneers have children, have them in the fields and tuck them under an arm and go on." However, we ran out of money in Los Angeles and were working there when World War II broke out. JULIE HAIFLEY: What kind of work did you do in California? GRACE HARTIGAN: Well, I didn't work then because I was pregnant. He just got a job (pretended he knew about skiing) as a ski instructor in a department store, selling skis and telling people how to ski. I was too pregnant to work, and I didn't work until Jeff, my son, was a year old. The war broke out and we moved back East and Bob was drafted. JULIE HAIFLEY: Originally, was California sort of a stop on the way... GRACE HARTIGAN: It was a stop on the way to Alaska, was all.