Henderson, The Rain King

This painting was given by the artist to honor two University professors, the writer Saul Bellow and Harold Rosenberg, an art critic for the New Yorker. While the title refers to Bellow’s novel of the same name, Hartigan’s painting makes reference to Rosenberg through the gesture-filled brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism that he made famous in his seminal magazine reviews.

Though a part of the New York School, Hartigan is considered a "second generation" Abstract Expressionist, or one who did not invent the style, but built from it. The thinned pigments that drip instead of trace a heavy stroke of the brush display Hartigan’s understanding of the Expressionist idiom; her use of fluorescent paints, however, reveal the interest in commercialism and popular culture common to many younger artists, such as Andy Warhol in New York or Ed Paschke in Chicago, at this same time.