Grace Hartigan was a gestural painter whose work bridged two postwar art movements of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. In 1958 Life magazine called her “the most celebrated of the young American women painters”. Much as she appreciated the attention, she did not like the conditional ranking — she wanted to hold her own among men, specifically the rock stars of Abstract Expressionism, and for a time, she succeeded.

She shed marital and maternal bonds, made her way to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and gave herself over to painting. Like her friends Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Hartigan believed in the primacy of the brushstroke as an expression of untamable emotion. She did allow figurative elements to enter her canvases, and these were said to have played at the edges of Pop Art some years before that movement became established.

Some of her depictions borrowed from popular culture while making references to art history. Grand Street Brides (1954), for example, is notable as the work of a woman many times divorced and obsessively devoted to — even enslaved by — painting. In it she arrayed bridal shop mannequins to echo the figures in Goya’s Royal Family.

Late in her career, in 1993, Hartigan was included in the exhibition Hand-Painted Pop at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Though she had always despised the Pop Art movement as soulless and unpainterly, she admitted that she would rather be recognised as an innovator of an inferior movement than as a mere second-generation disciple of a great one.

Like another of her associates, the poet Frank O’Hara, she used fragments of both high and low culture to arrive at her own singular vision, exercising her belief that art should turn the vulgar into something beautiful and transcendent.

Certainly Hartigan did not work in isolation from the realities of life. She took odd jobs to make ends meet, sometimes serving as a model for illustrious artists. She travelled to Mexico in 1949 to study and paint. She never inveighed against the much maligned sexism of the American art establishment — a tedious subject, she asserted, that was only raised as an excuse by inferior talents.

In her heyday critical love of Hartigan was more or less unconditional. In 1950 the art critic Clement Greenberg and the art historian Meyer Shapiro deemed her important enough to have her work mounted in the New Talent group show which they presented at the Kootz Gallery.

A few years later the Museum of Modern Art included her in two seminal shows — 12 Americans, in 1954, and The New American Painting, which toured Europe and helped to make New York the artistic nerve centre of the moment.

Despite early recognition, however, Hartigan’s career and personal life were anything but linear progressions. Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1922, she married young and struck out with her husband, Robert Jachens, to live in Alaska at a time when to do so was truly adventurous. They ran out of funds in California, however, where she took up painting and had a son.

When Jachens was drafted during the Second World War Hartigan moved in with his parents for a spell and then left her child in their care and moved back to New Jersey to work as a technical draughtsman and to study painting. By 1945 she was on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, painting and meeting with other artists for coffee and talk of a changing world. She and Jachens divorced in 1947.

Hartigan considered herself more a genius than a talent, one on whom the imperative to paint was thrust, almost by a force of nature rather than personal election. Never one for false modesty, she spoke of her gifts as a colorist, and of her “startling virtuosity”. She reported in one interview that she was a household name at the age of 37 and that she sold just about everything she painted for several years thereafter.

She thrived in the postwar New York arts scene, giving parties on a shoestring, and inspiring male members of the bohemian elite to fill her loft with flowers. After the carnage of the war she believed that what was left was “a private conscience”, and “a strong sense of being American, of being pioneers again, American pioneers”.

Her paintings, though they relied on near-at-hand subject matter, were often executed with explosive fierceness. Some of her long-term personal relationships seem to have been casualties of her passionate dedication to work. Her son went to live with his remarried father and was long estranged from Hartigan who, in 1949, married a fellow artist, Harry Jackson. That union was soon annulled and, ten years later, her marriage to a gallery owner, Robert Keene, was equally short-lived. Her fourth husband, Winston Price, was an art collector and epidemiologist. He died in 1981 after being a self-selected subject for an experimental drug to treat encephalitis and suffering a long descent into mental and physical illness.

By then Hartigan had left New York and had been teaching for decades at the highly respected Maryland Institute College of Art. Beginning in 1965, she was director of — and the inspiration for — its graduate school, the Hoffberger School of Painting. Absorbing her new milieu into her work, she was influenced by her students and her adopted city. She produced depictions of Baltimore’s gritty urban and suburban environs, and developed inventive watercolor and collage techniques. She retired in 2007.

Hartigan’s son predeceased her in 2006.

Grace Hartigan, painter, was born on March 28, 1922. She died on November 15, 2008, aged 86