Wedding Day

"The remarkable thing about Hartigan's paintings is that she has been quoting past art since her earliest work. A the time Hartigan took on this practice in the early 1950s, it was a bold and even brave move to have made. In looking to past art for answers to her avant-garde painting, she took a chance that most, especially her fellow Abstract Expressionists, would not. But it worked." (S. Hirsh, Grace Hartigan: Painting Art History, exh. cat., Seattle, 2003, p. 6).