Jennifer Bartlett is a contemporary American artist whose paintings, drawings, and prints combine abstraction and representation, as seen in her large-scale installation “Rhapsody.” Coming of age as an artist during the 1960s, on the heels of abstract expressionism during a period when the art-world was dominated by men, she succeeded in expressing her unique artistic vision and voice and continues to do so to this day.
Background
Jennifer Losch Bartlett was born in 1941, in Long Beach, California, one of four children. Her father owned a construction company and her mother was a fashion illustrator who left the field to raise her children. She grew up in the suburbs of Long Beach, close enough to the ocean that she developed an affinity for water which would reappear in her mature work.
Education
Jennifer attended Mills College in Oakland, California, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1963. She then moved to New Haven to study at the Yale School of Art and Architecture at a time when Minimalism was the dominant style. She studied with Josef Albers, Jack Tworkov, Jim Dine, and Richard Serra, receiving her Master of Fine Arts in 1965. Bartlett has described the experience of study at Yale as her broadest influence.
After marrying medical student Ed Bartlett in 1964, she commuted between the Soho district of New York and New Haven, where she taught at the University of Connecticut. Following her 1972 divorce, Bartlett moved to New York full-time and began teaching at the School of Visual Arts.
Bartlett is best known for her paintings and prints in which familiar subjects — ranging from houses and gardens to oceans and skies — are executed in a style that combines elements of both representational and abstract art. She often works in serial form or creates polyptychs, and she frequently devises rule systems that guide the variations within a given group of works, requiring us to focus on "perception, on process, on the effect of shifting perspective — and on the leaps that take place in our minds no matter how rational we may think we are." In the late 1960s, influenced by the work of John Cage, she started bringing chance elements into her work.
Her realistic works favor mundane subjects, such as modest houses. Her installations often consist of multiple canvases as well as three dimensional objects. “House with Open Door” from 1988, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, consists of an oil paint on canvas diptych and the same house constructed out of wood.
The Dallas Museum of Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City) are among the public collections holding work by Jennifer Bartlett.
Most critics see Bartlett's work as inventive, energetic, wide-ranging, and ambitious. One writer has noted that a central paradox of her work is that Bartlett has taken the controlled, rationalist grid favored by Conceptual artists and used it to release an evocative torrent of imagery that has much in common with the Neo-expressionist work of the 1980s and that owes a debt to Impressionism as well. A few critics find her work shallow, overly focused on surface, and weakened by its eclecticism. She has had several retrospectives and survey exhibitions, the first in 1985 originating at the Brooklyn Museum (New York) and more recent ones in 2011 at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and 2014 at the Parrish Art Museum (New York).
Early on, Bartlett made a number of three-dimensional works that she subjected to extreme conditions such as freezing and smashing. She also realized that she wanted something to draw on that was erasable but gridded like the graph paper that she and many other Conceptual artists were using at the time. She came up with what is now one of her signature materials: foot-square steel plates with a plain white baked enamel surface on which was silkscreened a quarter-inch grid. She had these fabricated in large quantities, and later worked with other sizes as well.
With her earliest well-known work, “Rhapsody”, Bartlett reinvented the mural form for Conceptual art. “Rhapsody” is a painting executed on 987 foot-square enamel-coated steel tiles arranged in a grid 7 plates tall by roughly 142 wide, extending across multiple walls. The seven sections are entitled "Introduction", "Mountain", "Line", "House", "Tree", "Shape", and "Ocean." Subsequent series such as “In the Garden” and “Amagansett” have become more painterly while still retaining their systematizing rigor. Around 2004, she began including fragments of text — phrases, bits of dialogue, dreams — in some of her paintings.
In 1980, Bartlett began to work on a complex print project in collaboration with master printers in Japan. The result was “At Sea, Japan”, a waterscape printed on paper whose 6 panels span 8 feet in width. The image is built up from 96 screenprints and 86 color woodcuts.
“In the Garden” is a series of over 200 drawings (and later paintings and prints) that all take as their subject the garden behind a villa in Nice, France, where Bartlett stayed in the winter of 1979 - 1980. Bartlett uses a few major motifs — an old swimming pool, a statue of a urinating boy, a row of cypresses — to explore perspective, scale, and changing light conditions. The drawings range from pencil sketches to pastels and gouaches executed in a range of styles, and many are diptychs or triptychs. She later made her backyard garden in Brooklyn, New York, the focus of a similar series of diptychs.
With “Sea Wall”, Bartlett brought together oil painting and sculpture. The piece consists of a large painting of houses and boats on a dark ground, in front of which are placed sculptural versions of those same objects. A collaboration between Bartlett and the fiction writer Deborah Eisenberg, “Air: 24 Hours” first appeared as a book of 24 paintings by Bartlett with accompanying text by Eisenberg. Each painting shows a scene in Bartlett's house at a particular hour of the day.
“Amagansett” is a series of oil paintings that take the ocean, skies, and seaside landscapes of Long Island as their subject. They ar painted in a distinctive cross-hatched style in a limited palette favoring blues, greens, grays, and browns. Some pieces are diptychs in which Bartlett explores the shifts visible in a landscape between two moments of time or seen from two slightly different angles of view. In 1981, Bartlett created Swimmers Atlanta, a 200-foot multimedia mural for the Federal Building in Atlanta, Georgia. She has since completed commissions for Volvo, AT&T, Saatchi & Saatchi, Information Sciences Institute, and Battery Park. Bartlett has lived in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Paris and as of 2014 lived in Amagansett on Long Island.
Indeed, she has commented that she does not accept a distinction between figurative and abstract art. Bartlett’s subject matter is often mundane — a white chair, trees in a garden, a hallway—yet structured and formally analyzed in such a way as to give it a sense of profound meaning. She explores various methodologies to question the artistic form, asking, for example, what happens when a painting has no edges.
Quotations:
“I did two big series. One was abstract and one was figurative. I think that an abstract painting is actually more figurative than a figurative painting, because it frequently is closer to the thing it is depicting. If you paint a red square, you have a red square of a certain measurable dimension. If you paint a vase of flowers, the vase of flowers is not measurable — more abstract than the red square.”
Membership
She was elected into the National Academy of Design in 1990 and became a full member in 1994.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Bartlett is an artist in the Renaissance tradition, equally engaged in philosophy, naturalism, and aesthetics, constantly questioning herself and the world with her favorite mantra, "what if?" She has a keen mind and finds inspiration from "such disparate fields of inquiry as literature, mathematics, horticulture, film, and music.
Interests
Artists
Among Bartlett’s early influences were the painter Arshile Gorky, whose drawing she admired, Piet Mondrian, for the sense of stillness in the work, and Sol LeWitt, for his conceptual systematics.
Connections
After marrying medical student Ed Bartlett in 1964, she commuted between the Soho district of New York. Following her 1972 divorce, Bartlett moved to New York full-time. In 1983 she married German actor Mathieu Carrière, with whom she had a daughter, Alice; they divorced in the early 1990s.