When Grace Hartigan was a little girl, she was bewitched by
gypsies.  In the 1930s, the Travelers still roamed the
countryside in nomadic caravans, and young Grace would shinny up
the apple tree in her parents' backyard in Newark, N.J., to spy
on them. She spent hours watching the women in colorful skirts
and big hoop earrings telling fortunes, the men sharpening their
knives.The gypsies appealed to her boldness, her restlessness,
her sense of life as expansive and perilous. Although she never
left her yard, that's when Grace Hartigan threw in her lot with
the adventurers.  She became a nationally famous painter while
still in her 20s and was featured in Life and Newsweek. Her
closest friends included such icons of abstract expressionism as
Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, and she had
a two-year romance with the painter Franz Kline. Her works are
owned by virtually every major art museum in the United States,
including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of
Chicago and the Sol