“I have found my ‘subject,’ it concerns that which is vulgar and vital in American modern life, and the possibilities of its transcendence into the beautiful.”

—Grace Hartigan, Artist Statement, 1956

Grace Hartigan’s The Fourth, 1959 is a monumental painting in every sense—an explosive convergence of American identity, postwar ambition, and painterly force, staged in bold, abstract strokes across a 14-foot-wide canvas. With its vivid red, white, and blue palette and dynamic, high-impact surface, the work channels the charged symbolism of Independence Day, conjuring fireworks, flags, and celebration while also gesturing toward deeper tensions between national mythology and individual expression. Painted during a feverish summer in Long Island, in what became Hartigan’s most prolific period, The Fourth emerged from a moment of intense creative output, rising institutional recognition, and personal transition. Its significance is underscored by its provenance: the painting was once owned by William A. M. Burden Jr., a banker, philanthropist, U.S. Ambassador to Belgium, and a central figure in the postwar expansion of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Burden acquired The Fourth around 1959 and exhibited it the following year in Brussels through the U.S. State Department’s Art in Embassies program, which placed works by leading American artists in ambassadors’ residences abroad.

The Burden name alone signifies The Fourth’s importance within the cultural fabric of midcentury America. William A. M. Burden Jr., a great-great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt and founder of the Wall Street firm bearing his name, was elected president of the Museum of Modern Art in 1953, succeeding Nelson Rockefeller. He held the position through 1959—when he was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Belgium under President Eisenhower—and resumed the MoMA presidency from 1961 to 1965. Crucially, his tenure encompassed two landmark group exhibitions that featured Grace Hartigan: Twelve Americans in 1956, and The New American Painting, the latter of which traveled to eight European cities between 1958 and 1959 and introduced Abstract Expressionism to international audiences. Hartigan was the only woman included in this ambitious diplomatic showcase of American avant-garde painting, a reflection of her stature and symbolic significance at the time.

The Fourth’s composition and scale reflect Hartigan’s personal and professional momentum in 1959—a moment when she stood unmistakably at the forefront of the postwar art world. Just two years earlier, Life magazine had profiled her in its landmark 1957 feature “Women Artists in Ascendance,” alongside Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Nell Blaine, and Jane Wilson. The article described the group as “notable artists who happen to be women,” recognizing their contributions to the American avant-garde on equal footing with their male counterparts.ⁱ Photographed by Gordon Parks in striking, cinematic portraits, Hartigan emerged not only as a painter of serious merit but as a public figure emblematic of the new American art. 

Her growing reputation was reinforced by solo exhibitions at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and the acquisition of her work by major collectors including Philip Johnson, Nelson Rockefeller, Peggy Guggenheim, and Beatrice Perry. On May 11, 1959, Newsweek devoted nearly its entire art section to Hartigan, noting: “the most fervent praise frequently went to one of the youngest painters of the seventeen Americans represented [in The New American Painting exhibition]—and the only woman—37-year-old Grace Hartigan.”ⁱⁱ Hartigan’s reaction was conflicted. In a private notebook entry written shortly after the article appeared, she confessed: “I must close my doors so I can be alone again. I must have time to think and paint without constant interruption.”ⁱⁱⁱ

Against this backdrop, The Fourth can be read as a visual declaration—muscular, unruly, and unapologetically ambitious. With its sweeping scale and explosive energy, the painting claims space alongside the monumentality of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, demanding recognition not as the achievement of a “woman painter,” but as the work of an artist, period. During this period, Hartigan was deeply embedded in the Abstract Expressionist circle, summering in East Hampton among a tight-knit group of artists and poets. “Lots of New York people’d come out and summer out there,” she later recalled.^iv “So it was like moving yourself to a potato field—moving New York to a potato field.”^v Created in an enclave of radical painters, The Fourth is both homage and provocation: a Long Island-centric declaration of artistic independence, delivered in oil and thunder.

In the summer of 1959, Hartigan made plans to settle more permanently in the Hamptons, purchasing an old Victorian mansion near Bridgehampton with her new husband, local gallery owner Robert Keene. The house’s large garage was converted into a studio, where she resolved, in her words, “to paint like nature, uncensored.”^vi That same summer, while enjoying the career boost of her inclusion in Documenta II in Kassel, West Germany, she completed seventeen oil paintings—her most productive period to date. Coinciding with her Place series (1957-1959), The Fourth shares that body’s deep engagement with landscape—gestural yet structured, abstract yet suggestive of form. Fiery reds and oranges erupt against saturated fields of cobalt and white, conjuring fireworks, flags, and summer skies in a composition balanced between chaos and control. Art historian Robert Saltonstall Mattison has described the large-scale paintings from this period as “among her best work,” singling out The Fourth for its formal inventiveness and layered symbolism.^vii He connects the painting directly to a photograph of Hartigan seated on the porch of Ludlow Grange with Jane Freilicher, Philip Guston, and James Thrall Soby, all waving American flags, writing:

The shape of the painting and its red, white, and blue color scheme suggests the flags in [a contemporaneous] photograph, while the frothy brushwork calls forth images of fireworks exploding against the sky. All the vibrant color areas soar toward the top of the painting. Boldly dripped pigment is played off against broadly brushed passages of red, orange, and white. The feathery paint strokes and indistinct shapes also are reminiscent of contemporary paintings by Guston, but his intimately scaled, inward-looking works are otherwise remote from the fiery enthusiasm of The Fourth.^viii

Hartigan’s energetic brushwork reflects her preference for surface projection over spatial depth—a technique she credited to mentors like Willem de Kooning. Her aim was to make the painting “vibrate out,” an effect achieved through calculated tension: purple drips form a curtain at the lower edge while bursts of black and yellow push outward in centrifugal motion.^ix Though resolutely abstract, her paintings resonate with representational force. “I don’t see how anyone can paint just landscape,” she once remarked.^x “The proper subject of man is man.”^xi In The Fourth, that human subject is felt through emotional immediacy and national resonance, the canvas pulsing with the explosive attitude of Independence Day.

This patriotic energy contrasts sharply with the cool detachment of Jasper Johns’ flag paintings, first exhibited in 1958—just one year before the present work was made. Where Johns interrogates symbolism, Hartigan unleashes it. As Cathy Curtis writes in Hartigan’s biography, “One of the fruits of Grace’s summer painting frenzy was The Fourth, a glorious, explosive riff on the American flag—a visual equivalent of the version of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ Jimi Hendrix would play eleven years later.”^xii 

But The Fourth also marks a transitional moment in Hartigan’s life. Though the summer of 1959 was among her most productive, Hartigan soon grew disillusioned with the pastoral calm of Long Island, claiming it drained the tension from her paintings. “What irony it would be,” she wrote, “if as the years go on I must either stay in the tensions [of the city] for the sake of my ‘art’—or risk living out of town—as I dream of—and paint relaxed and sentimental works!”^xiii That same year, she divorced Keene, began a whirlwind romance with Dr. Winston Price, and relocated to Baltimore—a move that distanced her from the New York art world and shifted the trajectory of her career. Nonetheless, The Fourth stands as a culmination of everything Hartigan had achieved up to that point: critical success, institutional validation, and artistic clarity.

ⁱ Life Magazine, 1957; cited in The Gordon Parks Foundation, “Women Artists in Ascendance,” May 2020, online.
ⁱⁱ Grace Hartigan, quoted in Robert Saltonstall Mattison, Grace Hartigan: a Painter's World, New York, 1990, p. 53.
ⁱⁱⁱ Grace Hartigan, quoted in Mattison, p. 53; as cited by Cathy Curtis, Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter, Oxford, 2015, p. 168.
^iv Grace Hartigan, quoted in “Oral History Interview with Grace Hartigan,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institute, Washington, D.C., May 10 1979, online.
^v Ibid. 
^vi Grace Hartigan, quoted in Mattison, p. 50.
^vii Mattison, p. 50.
^viii Ibid.
^ix Grace Hartigan, quoted in James Thrall Soby, “Interview with Grace Hartigan,” Saturday Review, vol. 40, issue
40, October 5 1957, p. 27.
^x Grace Hartigan, quoted in Mattison, p. 42.
^xi Ibid. 
^xii Cathy Curtis, Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter, Oxford, 2015, p. 174.
^xiii Grace Hartigan, “September 9, 1954,” The Journals of Grace Hartigan, 1951–1955, Syracuse, 2009, p. 148.