-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. In addition to Bartlett and Graves, the "It's called a dry Martini. When Grandpa was a young man, list includes Elizabeth all the young men on the move drank dry Martinis." 52 turned out, to having the photographic evi- dence of their works offered for sale in high- priced galleries. It was a .,. period of great uncer- tainty and confusion. Dozens of young artists were searching for the unique something that would single them out from the crowd-the new image, the new material, the new mode of expression. "I liked all of it," Bartlett recalls. She wanted somehow to take it all in-not just the newest trends but also the work of artists who had already made their mark. One of the artists she and her friends par- ticularly admired was Jasper Johns, but this did not prevent her from getting into heated ar- - ..... - guments with Johns when they met. "Jen- "My ambition is to be a talk-show host. I myself don't have much nifer was sort of a to say, but I'd like to offer encouragement to those who do." brat," Elizabeth Mur- ray has said. "She was • • outspoken, and she seemed very sure of her- to see her in New York. Living in early sixties, but had taken longer to self, and she made people angry- New York made her exhausting gain recognition, was on its way to especially men." The kind of work schedule bearable. She never once con- becoming the dominant style of the that Bartlett was doing then struck sidered going back to California. "I seventies; many young artists, influ- Elizabeth Murray as "unfathomable." didn't think it was possible to be a enced by Frank Stella's stripe paint- Some of it looked like process art-a serious artist there," she told me. ings and Donald Judd's metal-box form that made use of non-art mate- "And anyway I was just crazy about sculptures, were trying to reduce rials in ways that emphasized the New York. I remember, the first time painting and sculpture to their essen- processes through which they could I got there, being knocked down by a tial elements of shape, color, and vol- become art. In Bartlett's case, though, big, fat woman when I was trying to ume, and to do so in ways that re- the processes had to do mainly with hail a taxi-for some reason, this ap- moved all traces of the artist's personal her living in New York. She bought pealed to me enormously." touch or sensibility. Others were mov- cheap merchandise from the second- She had a built-in network of ing in different directions: using the hand outlets on Canal Street-quanti- friends. Elizabeth Murray, an artist Nevada desert or their own bodies as ties of red plastic sugar bowls, for who had been her best friend at Mills art material (earth art, body art); be- example, which she subjected to var- College, had moved to New York the coming public performers of one sort ious ordeals. One was dropped from year before. Jonathan Borofsky had a or another (performance art); investi- a fourth-floor window; another was loft just down the block on Greene gating language in its relation to art left outdoors for a week; a third was Street, and Barry LeVa, who had been (art and language); or shedding the left outdoors for a month; a fourth in her class at Woodrow Wilson High notion of the art object altogether and was baked in an oven for ten minutes School, and was just becoming known devoting their attention to mathemati- at three hundred degrees; and so forth. in N ew York as a Conceptual artist, cal, linguistic, or philosophical con- At the end, she set them all out on the lived not far away. Through them she cepts, which in some cases did not take floor of her loft, in a temporary tab- got to know most of the young New any material form (Conceptual Art). leau. She made a series of wall hang- York artists and kept in touch with all Some of this activity seemed to be a ings out of stretched, interlaced canvas sorts of new developments. The open- reaction against the increasing com- straps-the kind of straps people use to ing-up process of the early nineteen- mercialization of the art world, al- tie up their suitcases or trunks. She sixties had led to a bewildering prolif- though even the earth artists, whose also painted, and she made a great eration of experiments, styles, and labors in the desert and elsewhere many drawings-colored-dot draw- ideas. Minimalism, which had started looked like noncommercial ventures of ings on graph paper, which often at about the same time as Pop, in the the purest sort, were not averse, it seemed to her the most interesting 55 things she was doing then. In addi- tion, she had started to write. Some of the Conceptual artists appeared to be more interested in words than in visual images; Bartlett says that writing seemed easier to her than painting. She wrote a long, four-part essay called "Cleopatra" (it dealt with the histori- cal Cleopatra and a quantity of other, unrelated subjects, and was published in 1971 by Adventures in Poetry, a small New York press), after which she commenced work on her autobiog- raphy-an open-ended document that would eventually turn into a thou- sand-page autobiographical novel, called, self-mockingly, "The History of the Universe." Trying out all these forms and moving in several directions at the same time tended to put her at a disadvantage among her peers, most of whom had charted what they hoped was a unique course and were sticking to it. She usually found herself on the defensive when talking with the artists at St. Adrian's or the other downtown bars where they gathered. "People had very definite opinions, and everybody was terrifically competitive," she re- calls. "I imagine there were very few people doing abstract work who were acceptable to Brice Marden, and very few people doing sculpture who were acceptable to Richard Serra. I didn't really have a point of view like that. I liked a lot of different people's work." Few of the artists of her generation were making money from their art. They supported themselves any way they could-carpentry, bartending, teaching. Bartlett was still commuting "Tweet?" to the University of Connecticut. Her teaching methods were unpredictable. • • After once criticizing a student's fail- ure to use the whole space of a canvas would be terrific to do I couldn't." like the signs in New York subway -to "make every inch count," as she At this point, late in 1968, she hit stations, which gave her the idea), and had been told to do at Yale-she be- on the notion of using one-foot-square on which she superimposed a silk- gan to think that maybe it would be steel plates as the basic module for her screened grid of light-gray lines (sug- interesting to have some blank space paintings. The Minimal artists often gested to her by the graph-paper around the image after all, so she had used modular units, but in Bartlett's drawings she had been doing). All this her students try that. One of the prob- case the idea had nothing to do with had to be done for her by professional lems in her own work was that other Minimalist sculpture, or with philo- jobbers, and that suited her fine. Bart- people's ideas interested her too much; sophical meditations on "the object." lett is an exceptionally fastidious she had a lot of trouble thinking up She wanted a simple, fiat, uniform sur- worker; some of the inspiration for the ideas of her own. Her best ideas always face to paint on-a surface that did steel plates must have come from her came out of the actual process of not require wooden stretchers, canvas, abhorrence of mess. working. She felt that if she could find and all the bothersome paraphernalia The paint that she found to use on a new method that involved a great of oil paint. "I thought that if I could the baked-enamel surface was Testors deal of physical work, a "labor-inten- just eliminate everything I hated do- enamel, which is sold mainly in hobby sive" method, she would be a lot better ing, like stretching canvas, then I'd be stores to be used on model airplanes off. "I was looking for a way to get able to work a lot more," she ex- and cars. It comes in twenty-five col- work done without the burden of hav- plained later. She tried a number of ors, in small bottles that can be re- ing to do anything good," she told different surfaces-wood, plastic, alu- capped when not in use. Bartlett me. "I wanted desperately to be good, minum-before settling on the steel started out by limiting herself to four of course, but whenever I sat down plates, which were coated with a layer colors-yellow, red, blue, and green- and tried to think of something that of baked-on white enamel (very much plus black and white. "It always made 56 me nervous to use just the primary Prince Street, functioned almost like tended to get overlooked, and the total colors," she told me. "I felt a need for the nonprofit "alternative spaces" that effect was of a large room entirely green. I felt no need whatsoever for appeared a few years later. She showed filled with colored-dot paintings in a orange or violet, but I did need green. mostly unknown artists, and advised mind-boggling display of patterns. Al- Of course, I know that yellow and and encouraged a great many others. though a majority of the patterns were blue make green, but not really in the She also made her gallery available in abstract, she had also included a very same way that yellow and red make the evenings for all kinds of special large (sixty-plate) painting in which a orange. I just had to have green." She events-benefits, performances, poetry rudimentary but clearly recognizable applied her colors in the form of dots, readings. Bartlett herself gave a read- house-a square with a triangle on top in strictly planned combinations and ing at the Paula Cooper Gallery soon -appeared in many different aspects progressions. The sequence of colors after her show at Alan Saret's loft, and in a wide range . of colors that was always the same-white, yellow, from her autobiography-in-progress, suggested different times of day and red, blue, green, black-but her com- and later she gave several more read- different seasons of the year. A lot of binations and progressions ran a gam- ings there. people saw the show. There were even ut from simple to extremely com- Bartlett's next show was at the a few sales (the prices were modest), plex. What she was doing sounded like newly opened Reese Palley Gallery, on and there was a review in A rtnews by Conceptual Art: she was using mathe- Prince Street, in January of 1972. Pal- Laurie Anderson, who was just get- matical systems to determine the place- ley had a large space, and by then ting started then as a performance art- ment of her dots. But the results-all Bartlett had more than enough work ist, and who supplemented her income those bright, astringently colored dots to fill it-hundreds of enamelled steel by writing gallery notes. bouncing around and forming into plates grouped together into multipart During the next year and a half, clusters on the grid-never looked series paintings. (In the show at Bartlett continued to pour her energy Conceptual. For Bartlett, the mathe- Saret's, each plate had been presented into diverse activities. In 1972, she got matical system was not important in singly.) It was hard even for her to a job teaching at the School of Visual itself; its only function was to provide tell where one painting stopped and Arts, in downtown Manhattan, which a means of getting work done. The the next one began. In hanging the meant that she could quit commuting benefits came from the physical act of show, she had left a two-foot space to Connecticut. She did a lot of paint- applying the paint, not from the between series, a one-foot space be- ing, and her work was included in system. tween the various sets of plates within several group exhibitions outside New It was indeed a great way to get a a series, and a one-inch space between York. Her autobiographical novel, lot of work done. In 1970, she showed individual plates. These separations meanwhile, was getting longer and "about three or four longer, its pages of personal hundred" painted steel history interspersed with plates (her memory is a bit ____/.... m, .__ brief prose portraits of vague here) in her first friends, lovers, members of N ew York exhibition, at her family in Long Beach, Alan Saret's loft, on SITE OF fellow-artists, chance ac- Spring Street. In those quaintances. She was di- days, Saret, an artist who HISTORIC vorced from Ed Bartlett has since become well by this time. One of her known, occasionally ME.DIA EVENT closest friends was Paula turned his loft into an Cooper, whom she de- exhibition space for him- scribed in an admiring self and others. (The prose portrait. "People find dancer-choreographer Paula beautiful, reserved, Laura Dean gave her first and don't always know performances there.) Only what she's thinking," it a few art galleries had reads in part. "She is five opened in the area south of feet, seven inches tall, thin, Houston Street, and much with dark hair, a large of the activity there was mouth, large brown eyes, still impromptu and in- and a small soft high- formal. Before her show at pitched voice. She is Saret's, Bartlett marched stubborn, slow to make into the nearby Paula decisions, and has an er- Cooper Gallery and bor- ratic explosive temper." A rowed its mailing list, decision that Paula Cooper which she used to send out had been slow to make in- announcements. This was volved taking Bartlett into not quite as brash as it her gallery. Bartlett had sounds. Paula Cooper, the made no secret of her de- first person to open a gal- sire to be there, but Cooper lery in SoHo, in 1968, did had reservations about her everything she could to work. She was a little put help young artists. Her off by Bartlett's wanting to gallery, which was then on crowd so many paintings 61 into a show, and also by her blithe with black dots, representing the one picture stopped and the next be- way of following a mathematical sys- square of two hundred and fifty-six. It gan; the show might almost have been tem until it became inconvenient and was the kind of mathematical system a single painting, she thought, except then bending it or simply dropping it. that Bartlett enjoyed- mathematics' that it had not been planned that way. She accused Bartlett of being a "nihil- goofy side. It struck her now that she could orga- ist" in this respect. Cooper admired Several group shows followed, in nize and orchestrate a really large very much the work of the Conceptual and out of New York. Bartlett went to work whose effect would be like the artist Sol LeWi tt, whose first wall Europe for a gallery show of her work experience of a conversation, in which drawings (made directly on the wall) in Genoa and a two-artist show with subjects are taken up, dropped, and were done in her gallery. She felt that Joel Shapiro, a good friend of hers, at then returned to in a different form, if you decided to use a mathematical the avant-garde Garage, in London. with many voices and interwoven system, as Le Witt and several other Her medium was still Testors enamel themes. Since the conversation was to Conceptualists did, then you were in- on enamelled steel plates, but it was no include "everything," she decided that volving yourself in an investigation longer austere; she had begun to use it would have both figurative and that became, in effect, the content of more and more of the twenty-five col- nonfigurative images, and that they the work, and for this reason you had ors, sometimes mixing or layering could appear in small scale, on indi- no business breaking the system. It them to make new colors. ' In a big vidual enaplelled squares, or spread out took her a while to understand that work called "Drawing and Painting," over a great many squares. She picked Bartlett had no real interest in the which appeared in a group show at the first four figurative images that system or the concept-that for her it Paula Cooper's new Wooster Street occurred to her: a house, a tree, a was just a means. Early in 1974, at gallery in the fall of 1974, some sec- mountain, and the ocean. (Later, she any rate, Bartlett forced the issue by tions were done in colored dots, while greatly regretted the tree, which she demanding to know what Cooper's others were actually painted with a claimed to find banal, but she refused "intentions" were toward her work. brush, obliterating the grid. She was to alter her original decision.) The Reese Palley had closed his gallery. getting ready to throwaway the Con- nonfigurative images she chose were a Several other dealers had made offers, ceptual crutch. square, a circle, and a triangle. There Bartlett said, but she wanted to be would also be color sections and with Paula Cooper, and, as Cooper N the summer oJ 1975, Bartlett ar- sequences, sections devoted to lines puts it, "Jennifer usually gets what she I ranged to house-sit for well-to-do (horizontal, vertical, diagonal, and wants." She agreed to give Bartlett a friends in Southampton, on Long Is- curved), and several different methods show that spring. land's south shore. In exchange for of drawing (freehand, dotted, ruled). The "nine-point" paintings that taking care of the garden and the main These and many other basic decisions Badlett showed in the spring of 1974 house, she had the use of a small cot- were reached in her workroom in were rigorously Conceptual-to a de- tage on the property. She soon became Southampton, including the decision gree. She used only black dots and red so absorbed in her work that the gar- that she would make up her mind dots this time. The placement of pre- den dried up. Bartlett had laid in a about retaining or discarding a specific cisely nine red dots was identical on large supply of her steel plates (more plate within one day of finishing it. "I each one-foot square; it had been ar- than a thousand), with which she didn't want to get involved too much rived at by a random procedure that planned to make a painting "that had with thinking about the piece," she involved drawing numbered cards everything in it." This idea had been told me. "If I didn't like what I'd done from a coffee can (one number for the knocking around in her mind ever each day, I'd just wipe it out. I want- horizontal line on the grid, another since the Reese Palley show, in which ed tlie piece to have a kind of growth for the vertical). The black dots it had been so difficult to tell where that was actual rather than aesthetic." went down according to a va- Bartlett finished the first riety of prearranged systems: hundred-odd plates in South- they might connect one or ampton, and the rest-there more red dots in a straight line, were nine hundred and eighty- or descend vertically from the eight in all-in her New red dots (and then pile up York 10ft that fall and winter, chaotically at the.. bottom), or often working twelve or four- move about the grid in different teen hours a day. Many more directions. The general effect hours were spent in library was somewhat austere, and research. She read dozens of quite perplexing. One piece in books on trees, and dozens the show, called "Squaring," more on mountains. Al- had no red dots at all. It was a though the figurative images sequence of thirty-three plates, she used were very simple with two black dots in the two ones, she wanted to show an top left-hand squares of the essential tree and an essential grid on the first plate, four mountain (the peak she used black dots on the second, was taken from a book on the sixteen on the third, two Alps), and, anyway, she loved hundred and fifty-six on the to read. The huge work was fourth, and then twenty-nine organized in sections. The plates entirely filled (except for first section introduces all the a section of the twenty-ninth) major motifs; after that, each 62 motif gets a section to itself, with some and of change, and of painting itself." overlapping. The work gathers com- Russell's glowing review was an art- plexity as it goes along. The house, world event in itself, and the repercus- the tree, the mountain, the line and sions were large and immediate. color sequences, the geometric shapes, The gallery was closed on Sunday the many different techniques of draw- and Monday, but on Tuesday there ing and painting-all these elements was an even larger influx of visitors. and many more announce themselves At some point during that frantic THE DUSE individually and then begin to work morning, Paula Cooper took a tele- with one another in the continuity of phone call from a man she did not ENCHANTIIEIIT the whole, which culminates in a one- know, who said his name was Sidney (or, how her heart caught fire hundred-and-twenty-six-plate ocean Singer. He wanted to know whether overa Sambuca Romana.) sequence that employs fifty-four shades the work was still "available." Paula of blue. Bartlett never Cooper said that it was, When they met, she was saw the entire painting and he told her to hold at the height of her powers, an together until it was in- it for him-he would actress adored, even worshiped, by all Italy. He, rising poet, novel- stalled in Paula Coo- be there in forty-five ist, journalist, was the pampered per's gallery; her loft minutes. Although Bart- son of a wealthy landowner. could accommodate lett had decided that Together, Eleonora Duse and only a third of the "Rhapsody" should not Gabriele D'Annunzio were a plates at a time. Some- be broken up, she had memorable conflagration. times it struck her as never really thought it Both, it is said, were the worst idea she had could be sold intact; if habitues of a certain Roman cafe. ever had. When it was anybody wanted to buy There D'Annunzio was introduced nearly complete, she a section of it, she to the potent seduction of Sambuca still had not decided on a title. An En- planned to repaint that section. On Romana, Rome's remarkable li- queur distilled from berries of the glish friend, the architect Max Gor- that Tuesday, however, Sidney Singer, wild elderbush. Its suavity and don, said he thought the title should a relatively new collector, who lived in elegance appealed to his poet's have some reference to music; he sug- Westchester, arrived within the prom- sense of form; his ardent nature gested calling it "Rhapsody," and that ised forty-five minutes and bought the responded to the fire at its center. appealed to Bartlett's self-deprecating complete work, for what seemed at It was on a warm evening sense of humor. "It was so awful I that time the astronomical sum of in June that Duse and her coterie ar- liked it," she said. "The word implied forty-five thousand dollars. Paula rived at the cafe just as D'Annun- something bombastic and overambi- Cooper persuaded him not to take pos- zio's liqueur had been served. One tious, which seemed accurate enough." session of "Rhapsody" until it had of his friends insisted that he meet the great actress, taking him to her It took a week to install the nine been exhibited in a number of muse.,. table. The full force of her beauty hundred and eighty-eight square plates urns around the country-showings was overwhelming. Impetuously, at Paula Cooper's. Each plate was that gave an added boost to Bartlett's he drew up a chair and fell deep nailed to the wall, in most cases sepa- suddenly soaring reputation. into conversation. rated from those around it by exactly Bartlett's life did not change dra- As they talked, he toyed one inch on all sides. Although Bart- matically as a result. She paid off a lot with his glass, dropping roasted lett had never plotted the measure- of accumulated debts, bought some coffee beans into it one by one ments of the complete work, it filled clothes, and kept right on painting. until three floated there. Pausing to the available wall space of the gallery She also continued to teach at Visual light a cigarette, he held the match with almost mathematical precision. Arts and to write her autobiographical for a moment close to the liqueur. A blue flame danced over its sur- Word of the piece had been going novel. Nevertheless, something very face, matching the flame born at around SoHo, and the gallery was big had happened to her. She had come that instant in the hearts of poet crowded throughout the opening day, into her own estate as an artist, and it and actress. a Saturday in mid-May of Many had turned out to be a rather grand Thus began a relationship visitors commented on the painting's and impressive one. She had gained that for six years inspired them strong narrative quality; unlike virtu- the confidence to trust her inclina- both: him to write plays for her to ally all other contemporary painting, it tions, which were neither Minimal perform; her to performances of was a work that you "read," from left nor Conceptual, and her work since incandescent radiance. to right, and in which you could easily "Rhapsody" has been a direct reflec- As for Sambuca Romana become so absorbed that you lost your tion of her unencumbered personality Con Mosca, the drink the poet sense of time. Although "Rhapsody" as an artist-lavish in scale, decora- created, the taste is history. was clearly an art-world "event," no- tive, inclusive to the point of being body was quite prepared for the lead omnivorous, frequently mocking or article that appeared in the Arts and self-mocking, wildly eclectic, and Leisure section of the next day's startlingly ambitious. She is a lit- Times, in which John Russell, the tle like Robert Rauschenberg in her paper's art critic, described it as "the willingness to risk failure at every most ambitious single work of art that turn. Her mistakes are all made out in Drop liS a thle mid we'll Im ported by has come my way since I started to live the open, and as often as not they are send you our Sa/llbuca Palmer & Lord. Ltd., Romalla recipe book. Dept. NR4 in New York," a work that enlarges turned into assets. She said to me one Sambllca R011/al IQ84 Pf Syosset, NY 11791. "our notions of time, and of memory, day, "I've developed an infinite capaci- 64 APR.IL 15, 19&5 ty for work and none for reflection." The series of "house paintings" that followed "Rhapsody"-multipart renderings of the same rudimentary house image-expanded her repertory of painting styles. Impressionism, Ex- pressionism, Neo-Realism, Rayonism, Van Gogh, Matisse, Mondrian, Pol- lock-sometimes the entire history of modern art seemed to be making a guest appearance in her work, without quite upstaging the host. Bartlett was creating a style out of borrowed styles (and doing so long before the current fad for "appropriation"). Her new house paintings were really portraits of people. Their titles came from ad- dresses of people she knew well (one was a list of the places where she herself had lived), and most of them had some abstract visual reference to a particular person. In "White Street" (Elizabeth Murray's New York ad- dress), she used all twenty-five of the T estors colors, to suggest the kind of "contained chaos" that she associated with her friend. The most impressive painting in this series was named for Elvis Presley's Graceland Mansion, because Presley, a childhood idol of Bartlett's, died while she was painting it. "Graceland Mansion" is really five paintings hung in a horizontal se- quence, showing the same symbolic house image from five different angles, at five different times of day (its shad- ow falling to the left or to the right), in five different painting styles. Bart- lett's most famous print is derived from this painting. Also called "Grace- land Mansion," and published in an edition of forty, it is really five prints, each done in a separate technique: drypoint, aquatint, silk screen, wood- cut, and lithography.

HE "swimmer paintings" came T next. Elongated-oval shapes that had appeared for the first time in her final house painting (it was called "Termino Avenue," after the address of the hospital, in Long Beach, where her father died) became abstract swim- mers in a series of more than twenty large pictures, and also in her first public commission, a General Services Administration grant to execute a work for a federal courthouse in At- lanta. The new pictures had a dual format: half of the picture surface was enamelled steel plates, the other half was oil paint on canvas. "I hadn't painted on canvas in years, so I de- cided I'd just try it," she said. She took great pains to match the colors in the CALL HILTON RESERVATION SERVICE, OR SEE YOUR TRAVEL AGENT two mediums; the enamel-on-steel sur- THE NEW YOR.KER. 65 face was brighter and more reflective, but she was able to make the contrasts work together in interesting ways. For the hundred-and-sixty-foot-long lobby of the Atlanta courthouse, she pro- posed a series of nine paintings collec- tively entitled "Swimmers Atlanta" and ranging in size from two feet to eighteen feet square. Bartlett's sense of geography is a little hazy. When she made the proposal, she thought that Atlanta was on the ocean, or near it, and each of the nine paintings, for which she had made preliminary drawings in gouache, dealt with an aquatic subject-icebergs, whirlpools, eels, boats, and so forth-in a range of semi-abstract (or semi-figurative) styles. The G .S.A. accepted them without argument. Bartlett finished the commission on schedule, in 1979, and hurried back to her new living- and-working loft in SoHo, an im- mense space bought with income from the house paintings and redesigned in a spare, Art Deco style by the architect Peter Hoppner. She was working at full tilt, finishing the swimmers series, painting three big new dual-form works (steel plates and canvas) with more realistic imagery than she had used before ("At the Lake," "At the Lake, Morning," and "At the Lake, Night"), and immediately starting in on a series of even larger paintings- steel-plate paintings with canvas- cutout swimmers attached to the sur- face-on the theme "At Sea." Her work was in great demand by this time. Paula Cooper was selling it to a number of important collectors, and museums here and abroad were asking to show it. Life had become increas- ingly complicated as a result. Even though Bartlett generally shuns the New York art world in its social as- pects, avoiding gallery openings and cocktail parties and late evenings, she was feeling the multiple pressures of success. What she needed, she thought, was some time to herself, in a place quite far from New York. The perfect solution apparently presented itself in 1979, when she met the writer Piers Paul Read at a lunch party in New York and he proposed that they trade living quarters for a year-his villa in Nice for her loft apartment in SoHo. She agreed to it on the spot, sight unseen. Her acute dis- appointment when she moved into that dreary villa, on the wrong side of town and far from the sea, at a time of year (December) when the Cote d' Azur is at its worst, has been much writ- ten about. At first, she felt distinctly CALL HILTON RESERVATION SERVICE, OR SEE YOUR TRAVEL AGENT 66 APR.IL 15,1985 frightened, alone in her damp, cold house and knowing barely a word of French. She used to practice shouting "Au secours!" in case of burglars, al- though there wasn't much to steal. It rained and rained. Her plan had been to do no artmaking during her year in France. She would travel, go to muse- ums, and write a new book, tentatively entitled "Day and Night." ("The History of the Universe," parts of which have appeared in several van- guard magazines, is still unpublished in its totality; a shortened version is scheduled to appear in 1985.) She did do some travelling, to England and to Italy-Ravenna for the mosaics, Padua for the Giottos, Florence for Renaissance art, which she had appre- ciated rather casually until then. N at- urally, she visited the nearby Fonda- tion Maeght, in Saint-Paul de Verrce, and the Matisse Chapel, in Vence, which made a very strong impression on her. For some reason, though, she could get no writing done. And be- cause she is "no good at just having fun," as she puts it, the lack of an absorbing activity began to weigh on her. Several projects were started and abandoned, and then, one day, she sat down with a pencil and paper at the dining-room table, looked out the window, and began to draw "the aw- ful little garden with its leaky orna- mental pool and five dying cypress trees." "In the Garden," a series of two hundred drawings, in ten different media, that grew out of this unpropi- tious beginning, has running through it a remarkable sense of self-discovery. Picasso talked of forcing himself to forget how to draw. Eartlett had de- cided to learn to draw-to get down on paper what she saw, that is, with her eyes and her extremely active mind. She had taken no courses in this sort of drawing at Yale. Students who were accepted there were expect- ed to know how to do it, but in our era a surprising number of well-estab- lished contemporary artists have never learned. Bartlett had some help from her sister Julie, who came to stay with her for several months in the villa. Julie had recently graduated from the Art Center College of Design in Pasa- dena and was on her way to becoming a commercial artist. She knew about shading, perspective, and other con- ventions that Bartlett had _never both- ered with, and she was able to pass some of this knowledge on. One of the delights of "In the Garden" is the increasing skill with which the artist THE NEW YOI\KEI\ 67 renders the scene-the moribund pool "Ago': with its kitschy statue of a small boy Dress penny. Buck or bordeaux. urinating, the background of dark, $ 210.00. shaggy trees, the shrubs and the peren- nials in their unkempt beds. She shows it to us in every kind of light and shade (moonlight included), from ev- ery conceivable angle (in some cases, we are looking down from a consider- able height), and in countless varia- tions of style, from virtual abstraction to meticulous realism. Many of the drawings were done in pairs, with the more figurative one on the left and the more abstract one on the right. The "everything" that Bartlett usu- ally aims for is here in full measure. Look at this absurd garden, she seems to .be saying-look at it long enough and hard enough and you can find the world. Bartlett spent fifteen months on the project. Some of the later drawings were done from photographs, after she returned to New York, and others were done from memory. Her godson posed for a group of figut:e studies in which the little statue comes to life. Each of ten mediums-pencil, colored pencil, pen and ink, brush and ink, Conte crayon, charcoal, watercolor, 730 Frith Avenue, New York, N.Y 10019 212-246-6211 pastel, oil pastel, and gouache-is ex- Mail enquiries to: 663 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y 10022 plored thoroughly and boldly, with particularly impressive results in pastel and in watercolor. When the complete series was hung together for the first time, at Paula Cooper's, in 1981, it had an even stronger narrative pull than "Rhapsody." Critics comment- ed on the "cinematic" effect of the shifting points of view, and on the astonishing range of styles. An odd combination of qualities was visible throughout the series: spontaneity, bordering now and then on impa- tience, and, at the same time, a power- ful analytical intelligence that stood back from the work in order to see where it was leading. The analytic side of her talent 'had always been there, leading some critics in the past to find her work cold and unfelt; here, it was in balance with her impulsive, risk-taking courtship of excess. The strongest narrative thread was Jen- nifer Bartlett's unflagging curiosity, G(Jie her own high-spirited willingness to let the act of drawing call the shots. The enormous critical success of H8tel on 8an'B-ailcisco's'Nob Hill "In the Garden" made Bartlett more sought after than ever. Although it For people who understand the subde differences. was not possible to keep the series of For reservations anywhere in the U.S. except California call toll free (800) 227-4736. drawings intact (the demand for indi- In San Francisco ca ll (415) 989-3500. Elsewhere in alifornia call toll free (800) 622-0957. Telex: 34-0899 Cable: STANCOURT vidual drawings, pairs, and whole se- quences was intense), Bartlett was able to design and oversee its reproduction L...______--.J 68 in a handsome art book ("In the Gar- This issue does not trouble her. All den," Abrams, 1982) with a graceful painting is decorative to some degree, introduction by John Russell. Since she feels; what it is in addition to that then, of course, she has been working is what counts. She does not see why harder than ever. Although she of- she should do without the decorative ten says that she hates commissions element, or any other element that ap- and will never undertake another, she peals to her. There may be something has undertaken four major ones since of Long Beach in that attitude, but "In the Garden": the dining room of there is also a lot of N ew York. Charles and Doris Saatchi's house in N ever doctrinaire in feminist mat- London, for which she executed works ters, Bartlett does not see why she Lose· in oil, charcoal, fresco, enamel, tem- should do without a husband who is a pera, and collage; a huge steel-plate film star. She met Mathieu Carriere at Weight••• mural for the Institute for Scientific a New York dinner party in 1980 (it Information, in Philadelphia, a build- was one of the few dinner parties she ing designed by Robert Venturi; two went to that season), and they were thirty-foot murals for the staff dining married in 1983. Carriere has been a ... Or learning hCMI to room of Philip Johnson's A.T. & T. highly successful actor in European rethink your eating habits Building, in New York; and a mul- films since he was thirteen (he is now and lifestyle patterns. The tipart work for the new internation- in his late thirties), and because his Hilton Head Health al headquarters of the Volvo Corpo- work is in Europe Bartlett now spends ration, in Sweden, which includes about half the year living in Paris, in a Institute's 26-day Weight several pieces of large, freestanding fairly grand apartment near the Lux- Control Program can teach sculpture as well as paintings. Mean- embourg Gardens. She has told friends you hCMI to replace bad while, new paintings, prints, and that she dislikes living in Paris. "Paris eating habits with good drawings emerge from her studio with is so boring," she said last spring, just ones for permanent weight such frequency that Paula Cooper is before going back to rejoin her hus- control, and you'll learn the hard pressed to keep up with them. band. "After I'd been there for six exercises, nutrition and The recent work has been increasingly months, last year, I realized that I'd positive outlook that will figurative, and involved with land- hardly laughed once the whole time. scape-or, to be more accurate, with I'm very frightened that being away make good health and land- and waterscape, since Bartlett's from New York half the year may be sensible eating second passion for lakes, streams, and the sea bad for my work. But I also know that nature instead of a constant has not abated. Some of her admirers I don't want to be a great artist if what battle. wonder whether in these fluent, realist I have to give up includes someone to landscapes Bartlett may not at last be live with, kids, and so forth-which I For more information on finding her own particular style. Paula guess sounds pretty conventional and the Hilton Head Health Cooper doubts this, and so does the female." artist. When I asked her about it, she Elizabeth Murray reports that af- Institute and its programs, said, "I certainly hope not." ter Bartlett returned to Paris in the call (803) 785-7292.or send summer of 1984 she sounded, over in the coupon belCMI. HE feminist movement had a the transatlantic telephone, somewhat T significant effect on the New more enthusiastic about life there. York art world in the nineteen-seven- Paula Cooper is sure she will make 1------ties. While Bartlett would hardly something out of the place, just as she agree that full equality is at hand, the did out of the dingy garden in Nice. I situation for women artists here is cer- Paris may not be New York, but it is I tainly more open than it used to be and not entirely without interest for an I a great deal more open than it is in artist. Paris, in fact, might turn out to I Europe. In spite of this, the generation be just the place for an ex-Long Beach I of American artists that came along cheerleader to lose and then find her- 1 Hilton Head Health Institute after Bartlett's-the generation of J u- self in a gigantic new work of art. I lian Schnabel, David Salle, Richard -CALVIN TOMKINS Valencia Road in Shipyard Plantation I Longo, and others whose work began I P. a. Box 7138 Hilton Head Island, SC 29938-7138 to attract public notice in the late • I nineteen-seventies and early eighties I -is dominated once again by men. It SOCIAL NOTES FROM ALL OVER I is too soon to tell whether the shift is [From "Over the Coffee Cup," by Tommye Miller, in the Mobile (Ala.) Register] I Name ______temporary and accidental or whether it Christine and Alex Bowab are having a I Address ______reflects social or aesthetic considera- party on St. Pat's Day, Sunday, which is tions, or both. In the present climate I City ______State __ unusual to say the least. This is their fifth of heavy-handed, macho, neo-ex- annual Corned Beef & Kibbie Party to Zip___ Telephone L-) ----- pressionist painting, however, Bart- which no one will be admitted unless ap- I propriately dressed in either PLO or IRA lett's inclusive, analytical approach attire. The house is to be cordoned off into may tend to make her work appear four military sections where food appro- more "decorative" than it actually is. priate to that area will be available.