Jennifer Bartlett
Table of Contents
2014
Title Magazine, September 27, 2014, “Jennifer Bartlett: In the Garden,” by Kerry Bickford.
2008
Chicago Tribune, May 9, 2008, review, by Alan Artner.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 2, 2008, “Her past in now present, happily,” by Edith Newhall.
Newsweek, April 28, 2008, “Kennedy’s New Frontier,” by Peter Plagens.
MIT News, February 29, 2008, “New site sheds light on MIT’s hidden art treasures.”
2007
ArtForum, October, 2007, Scene & Herd, by Linda Yablonsky.
Art in America, January, 2007, “Bartlett Shows Her Colors,” by Vincent Katz.
2006
The Boston Globe, October 13, 2006, “From a minimalist approach, maximum impact,” by Ken Johnson.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 20, 2006, “Pictures take a chance with words,” by Edith Newhall.
The New York Times, May 12, 2006, “One Collection, Many Stories from the Land of Mavericks,” by Roberta Smith
2004
ARTnews, Summer 2004, “Review: Jennifer Bartlett, Richard Gray,” by Garrett Holg.
2002
ARTnews, April 2002, “Review: Jennifer Bartlett, Richard Gray,” by Garrett Holg.
Jennifer Bartlett: In the Garden Through September 27, 2014 Locks Gallery
By Kerry Bickford Jennifer Bartlett’s latest exhibition at Locks Gallery, Jennifer Bartlett: In the Garden takes a focused look at the work she produced between 1980 and 1983, a series now referred to as her In the Garden pieces. The genesis of In the Garden was Bartlett’s year spent at a friend’s villa in Nice, France. Initially disappointed with the grey weather and the run-down house, she channeled her energy into working with what she had—a small backyard with a pool, a dense line of cypresses, and a small sculpture of a boy urinating into the water. The ultimate result was a group of almost 200 drawings of the same scene, in a dizzying range of styles and executed in ten mediums, from pointillism in colored pencil to impressionistic pastels and Matisse-like gouaches. Bartlett exhibited them in New York in 1981, where they received praise from a number of critics, including New York Times writer Grace Glueck, who placed the work in the tradition of “obsessional stuff that lets us see deep into the Installation view: Jennifer Bartlett: In the Garden. Photo by makings of art.” Joseph Hu for Title Magazine.
Locks Gallery’s exhibition includes a cross-section of the “obsessional” three-year series. In addition to the suite of drawings, Bartlett’s In the Garden project had several additional stages, (detailed in Locks Gallery’s well-researched catalog) all of which are represented in the exhibition— her three sets of 7 paintings in a range of mediums, based on specific drawings; her prints of the same imagery; and her final paintings on canvas of the Nice scene, made from photographs Bartlett took while on-site. The one- room installation opens at the beginning—with In the Garden #1, 1980, a graphite take on the backyard scene, and one of 10 early works on paper in the exhibition. From there, the selection favors Bartlett’s cinematic late diptychs and triptychs, including Pool, Dog and Cat, and Night, all painted in 1983. The layout of the installation makes it difficult to trace In the Garden’s chronology, as it skips from her earliest works on paper to her last paintings in the series, and then back to her mid-series works on multiple media from 1982, finally ending with more drawings and watercolors. Bringing all of these pieces together does, however, allow several of Bartlett’s successes surrounding this series to come to light.
In the Garden has been characterized as the period where Bartlett taught herself to draw, but it could be more accurately defined as Bartlett’s mediation on place, its vagaries, and all the opportunities they afforded her. The iconic, square-and-triangle house motif was central to some of Bartlett’s earliest work, but with In the Garden, every detail of the backyard held potential, and was explored accordingly. Her intentions become particularly clear upon reading the notes she wrote to herself around the margins of In the Garden, 1980—her interest in capturing precise measurements of scale, perspective, hue, and time of day. In one of the earliest works on paper, In the Garden #17, 1980, Bartlett cuts from a birds-eye view of the entire backyard to a flattened, cropped view of the pool, the sculptures, and the trunks of the trees behind it, all roughly captured with a piece of charcoal. The work, however, is still strikingly observant—in the close-up, Bartlett notes where the sculpture’s shadow falls over the water, and how the cypresses appear to close in on the figure as the cropping becomes tighter. One of the joys of the exhibition is watching this kind of conscious, early experiment evolve into paintings like Pool, where Bartlett precisely scales the sculpture relative to gradually-steepened perspective. The painting captures the trajectory of the mid-morning light in all its nuances, as it illuminates a swath of cypresses or spills westward over the edge of the basin and transforms the water into a riot of abstract color. Even after In the Garden, Bartlett would continue to paint these precise constructions of time and place, particularly with her Air: 24 Hours paintings, each showing a new scene in her household at a different hour of the day, and in her more recent diptychs of details from her backyard garden in Brooklyn.
In the Garden is also a rare opportunity to explore both Bartlett’s mastery of multiple mediums and her willingness to embrace chance in her use of materials. Calvin Tomkins noted in a 1990 essay on Bartlett that while she executed her Swimmers series in the late 1970s, completed not long before In the Garden, she was obsessed with precisely matching the color and texture of her brushstrokes on canvas to those on her signature enameled steel plates. This tight control over medium is evident in the masterful In the Garden II, 1980, a four-piece representation of the pool and boy, in oil on canvas, enamel on steel plates, pastel on paper, and enamel on glass. The two works in enamel are overt tributes to Matisse, with their curved lines and palettes of pinks, yellows, and blues, while the representations in oil paint and pastel provide a modeled, three-dimensional take on the scene. Her two works in enamel are nearly line- by-line twins, and seemingly every brushstroke in oil paint is replicated in pastel. Bartlett encourages the viewer to recombine these pairs visually with her use of color. The two works on the left, in oil paint and enamel on steel plate, are darker in tone, with blues that suggest a cloudy day, while the other two pieces present the same image with more washed-out hues of blue and yellow, suggesting direct sunlight.
With In the Garden III, #5, 1982, however, a diptych painted in enamel on glass on the left and oil on canvas on the right, Bartlett accepts the viscosity of the enamel, which drips and runs in streams down the surface of the glass; the statue of the boy seemingly melts into the water below him. In a stark contrast she then pairs the left half with a strictly modeled oil painting, where she precisely delineates the cypresses with vertical strokes of black paint; the layered blues of the sky seem reluctant to touch the trees, leaving thin haloes of bare canvas. Bartlett takes note of several of the same details in both halves—the way the water darkens closer to the boy, where his pale shadow falls over the pool, the hints of blue in the cluster of trees on the left—but presents the scene as the sum of both renditions, a concession to the impossibility of any single, perfect representation.
Jennifer Bartlett is a daunting artist to display—her prolific practice and the recursive, self-referential character of her series make her work nearly impossible to summarize. In attempting to capture her full career of experimentation, spanning canvas and steel plates, representational painting and conceptual abstraction, (not to mention her printmaking, collages, and multimedia commissions) it is easy to lose sight of how Bartlett has covered immense distance through a lifetime of infinitesimal steps. In taking the time to focus on such a short, fruitful period of her career, Jennifer Bartlett: In the Garden compellingly demonstrates the importance of Bartlett’s more subtle experiments in medium, perspective, and juxtaposition.
THE ARTS
Fri, May. 2, 2008
Her past is now present, happily
An artist returns to the style that made her a star 30 years ago.
By Edith Newhall For The Inquirer
If you admire Jennifer Bartlett's enamel paintings on baked enamel steel plates, the minimalism-tweaking works that made her a young New York art star of the 1970s, and if you found yourself thinking recently that she should hurry up and reclaim her early style, you may be a mind reader. Bartlett has returned unambiguously to her past in her current show at Locks Gallery. At 97 feet long, and taking up two entire walls of the gallery's second-floor space, Bartlett's sprawling new plate painting, Song, may be second in monumentality to Rhapsody, her 153-foot-long enamel plate work from 1975-76, but it is a more rigorous, more abstract work, like the enamel plate paintings she made between 1972 and 1974, several of which are included in this show.
There are some vaguely recognizable elements in Song. A waxing and waning moon, perhaps, and a houselike structure come into focus. Now, of course, any Bartlett enamel painting, composed as it is of so many hand-painted dots on silkscreened grids, will seem to be referencing pixels. But what makes Song exciting is its lyrical sense of motion within the confines of those plates and grids, all created with black and tan dots. Bartlett seems to be happier orchestrating many parts moving along the wall, too, than caught within the edges of one stretched canvas.
More of Bartlett's early enamel plate paintings and her preparatory sketches for Rhapsody are on display on the gallery's third floor.
Locks Gallery, 600 Washington Square South, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. 215-629-1000 or www.locks.com. Through May 24.
From a Minimalist approach, maximum impact By Ken Johnson, Globe Staff | October 13, 2006
ANDOVER -- Jennifer Bartlett's ``Rhapsody" (1975-76) is one of the most celebrated single works of late 20th-century American art. It is also, because of its unwieldy size, one of the most seldom seen. An exuberantly playful, panoramic melange of abstract and representational imagery, it was painted on a grid of 987 1-foot- square steel plates, and it measures 7 1/2 feet high by 153 feet long.
Luckily for Boston-area art lovers, ``Rhapsody" is now on view in an exceptionally illuminating exhibition at the Addison Gallery of American Art . Organized by Allison Kemmerer , the Addison's Jennifer Bartlett’s “Rhapsody” at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover. curator of photography and art after 1950, ``Early Plate Works" examines an eight-year period that began in 1968 when, as a young artist in New York, Bartlett started painting exclusively on 1-foot-square steel plates with white, baked enamel surfaces overlaid by silk-screened grids of fine gray lines. (The plates are like thick, rigid sheets of graph paper.) For paint she restricted herself to the 25 colors of Testors enamels -- a material normally used by model-building hobbyists.
Bartlett derived her approach from the examples of such Minimalist and conceptualist artists of the '60s as Robert Morris and Sol LeWitt : She made works that logically reflected their own structure, materials, and procedures.
An uncommonly industrious artist, Bartlett produced most of the early pieces by applying small dots of paint within the little squares of the printed gray grid. One part of the show is devoted to multi-plate work bearing orderly, densely knit patterns of colored dots. Sensuously textured, optically captivating, they are like unusually vivid textile design studies.
Other works are made mostly of black dots and use the grids as game boards on which to follow predetermined rules for dot application. ``Squaring 2; 4; 16; 256; 65,536," for example, starts with a single panel with two black dots in the upper left corner. Then comes a panel with two times two dots, or four, followed by one with 16 and another with 256. The last step, the square of 256, requires a set of 30 plates to accommodate the grand total of 65,536 dots.
The black dot pieces are like primitive computer games, and part of the fun of them is figuring out what the rules are. There is also a definite visual intrigue about them that has to do with the repetition, rhythm, and progressive elaboration of the more or less comprehensible patterns.
If you have never seen it before, you are in for a shock when you enter the gallery devoted solely to ``Rhapsody." None of the early works prepare you for its size and complexity. Unfortunately, it is awkwardly shoehorned into the too-small gallery. It has to jog around the short walls of an entryway that juts into the main space, and that prevents you from seeing it all at once. Nevertheless, it is all there, and going from the earlier plate works to ``Rhapsody" is like going from a performance of short piano solos to a big-band concert.
At once wildly disjunctive and systematically sequential, ``Rhapsody" is a kind of landscape with certain archetypal images recurring: house, tree, mountain, and sky. At different points, these motifs are realized in different styles: in Pointillist dots, Expressionist brush strokes, cartoon outlines, and photo-realistic vignettes.
The landscape images are also interspersed with extensive passages of pure abstraction. One area presents dozens of variations on the relationship between a circle, a triangle, and a square -- all painted black on white. Another area explores permutations of overlapping straight and arcing lines, and several different areas have plates painted Minimalist-style in solid colors.
So ``Rhapsody" may be less a landscape than an encyclopedic compendium of modern art styles. It is, in a way, a profoundly academic exercise, but it doesn't feel dryly cerebral. Bartlett is like a jazz musician improvising with inexhaustible panache on illustrations from a textbook of 20th-century design.
``Rhapsody" has been called an art-history watershed, and it is in ways that are obvious and not so obvious. To '60s-style purists, its promiscuous mix of abstraction, conceptualism, and cartoonish representation would appear ridiculous. But for a later generation it heralded a new kind of freedom. The law of one style per artist was rescinded; style became optional. You could work in different styles even within the same work; you could combine representation and abstraction. Think of the clash of styles animating the paintings of David Salle in the 1980s. An era of insouciant pluralism came after ``Rhapsody."
What is perhaps less obviously significant is the treatment of art as a kind of language game. ``Rhapsody" is a field of free-floating signifiers that relate to one another more than to anything in the real world. It's not irrelevant to note that semiotics -- the quasi-scientific study of signs -- began decisively to influence academic thinking and writing about art around the time that Bartlett was working on her magnum opus.
Bartlett completed ``Rhapsody" long before the advent of the personal computer and the Web, but in its play with ungrounded signifiers it anticipates a world in which machine-mediated virtual realities increasingly substitute for old-fashioned natural and concrete experience. (Seeing it in photographic reproduction, you could mistake it for a huge computer printout.)
The world as projected in the works of many artists who came of age after ``Rhapsody" is a mediated world made up of movies, TV shows, pop songs, art reproductions, magazines, clothing brands, computer downloads, and countless other sorts of consumer products. For many artists the purpose of art has become to juxtapose and manipulate cultural signs lifted from the capitalist marketplace in ironic, semiotically sophisticated, and subversive ways.
But the play with empty signifiers can also breed a too-predictable cynicism. Nothing means anything more than anything else, and all culture starts to appear vacuous. As the art historian Brenda Richardson relates in her richly informative catalog essay, Bartlett went on to deal in her art with more complex and personal experiences, including recovered memories of early adolescent sexual abuse. Whether or not that made for better art, it does suggest a hunger for an art of more humanly real substance. When ``Rhapsody" first appeared, though, it opened up an exhilarating new universe of aesthetic and conceptual possibilities. At 30, it still gives off infectiously adventurous vibrations.
Ken Johnson can be reached at [email protected]. 8BTIJOHUPO4RVBSF4PVUI 1IJMBEFMQIJB1" UFMGBY JOGP!MPDLTHBMMFSZDPN XXXMPDLTHBMMFSZDPN