-50 • .. 0 p o F I L E 5 • ., 0 GETTING EVER.YTHING IN ENNIFER BARTLETT'S the best families-it had a New York friends are strong art 'department, and J often surprised to learn an even stronger music that she grew up in South- department, both of which ern California. How could were open to advanced con- that laid-back, sybaritic temporary work. Fernand culture (as we tend to view Leger and Max Beckmann it from the East Coast) have had taught there, and so produced an artist of her had Darius Milhaud and energy, analytic rigor, and John Cage. Jennifer Losch undissembled ambition? absorbed a wide variety of Bartlett herself says that aesthetic influences, and California always seemed began painting in a loose ab- strange to her. When she stract style derived mainly was five 'years old, she told from the work of Arshile her mother she was going to Gorky. She had her first be an artist and live in New one-person show at Mills York. Although she now in 1963, her senior year. lives part of the time in Paris The reactions to it were in order to be with her hus- mixed, but the slides she band, the film actor Mathieu had made of some of the Carriere, New York has been paintings were impressive her real home for the last enough to get her into fifteen years and her aesthetic home class. Her mother had been a commer- the graduate art program at Yale, for a lot longer than that. cial artist, a fashion illustrator; she which happened to be the best possible The art world becomes more diver- quit work when Jennifer was born. place just then for an ambitious art sified all the time, of course, and Bart- Jennifer went to the vast public student. lett's career reflects that fact. As one schools of Long Beach, where she Yale's popular reputation as an in- of the most widely exhibited artists of quickly established herself as the class cubator of stockbrokers has sometimes her generation-the generation that nonconformist, arguer, and artist. "I obscured its strength in fields that emerged in the late nineteen-sixties never had the kind of natural talent other Ivy League schools have barely and the early nineteen-seventies-she that lets you draw portraits or horses begun to cultivate. The School of Art is well known in Tokyo and in Lon- or things like that," she recalls. "I'd and Architecture, founded in 1869, is don, where her disconcertingly direct do very large drawings on brown a good example. Teaching standards manner, her helmet of close-cropped paper that showed, for example, every- there have always been on a high and dark hair, and her habit of cracking thing I could think of underwater. Or thoroughly professional level. In 1950, jokes at her own expense lead people to scenes with people dropping from cliffs the school's fine-arts program came assume that she must be a native New into boats, and Indians in the back- under the guidance of Josef Albers, Yorker. Nevertheless, she did grow up ground. Art teachers always liked me, the former Bauhaus teacher, who had in Long Beach, California, and her but I never really understood why established his American reputation at childhood there-she was the eldest in what I did was good." In addition to Black Mountain College, in North a family of four children-seems to drawing constantly, she developed an Carolina. Albers changed the pro- have been a reasonably conventional early passion for reading-stories and gram's conservative direction, putting one. It was her response to it that was novels of all kinds. Sometimes, her the emphasis squarely on modern art unusual. She was born in 1941, and reading took the place of her school and bringing in as guest teachers dis- she put in enough time at surfing assignments. Told to read one thing tinguished contemporary artists with beaches and on the sidelines of various and write an essay on it, she would widely divergent approaches-Willem athletic fields (she was briefly a cheer- read something entirely different and de Kooning, Stuart Davis, Burgoyne leader at Woodrow Wilson High write about that; For a while in her Diller, Jose de Rivera, Ad Reinhardt, School) to become permanently dubi- teens, she thought about becoming a and James Brooks, among others. As a ous about male supremacy-a trait lawyer, because she was so good at ar- result, Yale in the nineteen-fifties be- that proved useful to her when, in guing, but aside from that there was came a mecca for the most adventurous 1963, she went to Yale. Her father, no significant wavering from her deci- art students. Albers retired in 1958, but Edward Losch, was a pipeline engi- sion, at age five, to be an artist. the program continued to attract many neer whose earnings fluctuated from The decision was reconfirmed at more students than it could accommo- year to year. The family's mode of Mills College, in Oakland, California, date. (One out of twenty applicants living fluctuated accordingly, but most which she entered in 1959. Although got in.) When Jennifer Losch arrived, of the time they were able to consider Mills was known as the Vassar of the in the fall of 1963, Jack Tworkov had themselves as in the upper middle West-as a place for young women of just taken over as the school's chair- 51 man. Tworkov was a well-known Murray, Susan Rothenberg, Judy Pfaff riage. Jennifer painted day and night N ew York painter, one of the first (Yale, M.F.A. 1973), Lynda Benglis, -large splashy canvases that were generation of Abstract Expressionists. Judy Rifka, Jackie Ferrara, Mary still mainly Abstract Expressionist in Unlike some artists of that generation, Miss, Nancy Holt, Lois Lane, Audrey style. Occasionally, one of the male he took a lively and supportive interest Flack, Pat Steir, Cindy Sherman, students would infuriate her by saying in the work of Robert Rauschenberg, Louisa Chase, Catharine Warren, Su- you'd never know they had been Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and other san Crile, and many more. The femi- painted by a woman. young people who were finding new nist movement of the early nineteen- paths, and he invited a number of them seventies had a lot to do with the ARTLETT took her B.F.A. degree to Yale as guest teachers. Tworkov increasing recognition of women in B in 1964 and her M.F.A. in 1965. oriented the school primarily toward art, but the movement had not sur- Ed Bartlett still had two more years New York and its rapidly expanding faced when Bartlett was a student. of medical school, so instead of mov- art world. Midtown Manhattan was Male supremacy was still the norm at ing immediately to N ew York she got less than two hours away by car, and Yale, and she reacted to it with con- a job teaching art at the University the students went down regularly to siderable anger. "I adopted a com- of Connecticut, in Storrs, which was visit the galleries and the museum pletely macho attitude of my own," nearly two hours northeast of New shows. The art world, which had been she told me. "I was terrified my first Haven. She went to New York every a small and tightly knit fraternity until semester, but then I just started build- chance she got, though, and that put the mid-nineteen-fifties, was opening ing huge stretchers that interfered a strain on the marriage. After two up to all sorts of new influences-new with the people working near me." years of this, she rented a small loft art forms, new galleries, and a new She also got married. Edward Bart- apartment for herself on Greene public, whose interest was whetted by lett, a pre-med student at Berkeley, Street, in the part of lower Manhattan rising prices and by the controversy had come East with her to enter Yale that would soon be called SoHo but surrounding Pop Art. For the first Medical School; they were married was then a grimy, run-down industrial time in many years, a career in art during their first year there, and area where abandoned loft space could began to seem like something more moved into a small apartment off cam- be rented quite cheaply. She commuted than a quixotic gamble. Among Yale's pus in New Haven. Neither of them to Connecticut from there during the highly competitive art students, the had much time to devote to the mar- week; on weekends, her husband came feeling was very strong that they were "the next generation" in contempo- rary art; they used to joke that the New York art world was an extension of Yale. "There was no ques- tion in our minds that we would be showing at Leo Castelli's any day," Bart- lett recalls. "I remember hearing that Larry Poons had had his first New York show when he was twenty- six, and it was perfectly clear to me that if I hadn't had a show by the time I was twenty-six I was quit- ting." A number of the students who got their B.F.A. or M.F.A. degrees, or both, at Yale during the years that Bartlett was there did become important figures in contemporary art: Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Jonathan Borofsky, Nancy Graves, Rackstraw Downes. One of the inter- esting things about this generation of artists is that so many of the good ones are women.