New York artist Jennifer Bartlett’s conceptual painting, executed on a 1-foot-by-white enamelled steel plate (inspired by the city’s subway system), blossoms into “Rhapsody” and is over 153 feet long. He died on June 25th at a milestone painting festival. Her home in Amagansett, New York She was 81 years old.
Her obituary was jointly announced by her New York representatives Paula Cooper Galleries and Marianne Boesky Galleries.
Bartlett, who was battling dementia, died of acute myeloid leukemia, which he was diagnosed with in early July, according to his daughter, Alice Carriere.
An unrepentant maverick who started out as a fringe member of the conceptual art division of the post-minimalist generation, Ms. Bartlett is a mathematician or geometric artist who, without making further aesthetic decisions, can only do what she needs to do. devised a system. She characterized this as “What if?” approach.
Each steel plate was printed with a grid of 1/4-inch squares, and dots were added according to the system she set up, sometimes giving results that appeared to be computer-generated.
A key turning point in late 20th-century American art, Rhapsody, Bartlett integrated the Cerebral style of conceptualism into her medium of choice: painting. She also broke down the walls separating abstraction and representation, as did painters such as Neil Jenney, Lois Lane, Susan Rosenberg and Joe Zucker. But on “Rhapsody,” Blake was grand, raucous, and generous.
The work was first exhibited at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Soho in 1976, with 987 plates occupying all available wall space. Then, to the surprise of many, it looked like it was made to fit into the giant atrium of a modern art museum. The collection was a gift from architect and collector Edward R. Breuda and was acquired in 2005.
British critic John Russell, who reviewed “Rhapsody” for The New York Times, called it “one of the most ambitious new works of art since he began living in New York”. It brings together aspects of pop, minimalism, conceptual art and process art, while at the same time re-opening art to the images, narratives, repetitive patterns, appropriations and overt juxtapositions that continue to influence painting. .
Its images span numerous styles, from photorealist to naive, with some modernist images in between. Exploring lines, shapes, and colors that are a purpose in themselves, presenting simple themes that Bartlett will be obsessed with for the rest of his life, such as trees, mountains, houses, and the sea.
She described “Rhapsody” as “a conversation”. “In the sense of beginning to explain one thing, then moving on to another topic, explaining by analogy, and coming back again”. seems to be speaking at once.
“Rhapsody” made Ms. Bartlett a star, but not everyone loved it. She was questioning herself, especially since it wasn’t fully completed until it was installed in Paula Cooper. , worried that this piece might be the worst idea she’d ever come up with. Her friend suggested the title “Rhapsody,” she said, “I loved it because it was so bad.”
“That word implied something pretentious and ambitious, but it seemed accurate enough,” Tomkins quoted her.
She likes to recount what a prominent New York curator said of her dot face, “It’s not painting, it’s knitting,” as she did in a 2011 Archive of American Art oral history interview. I liked it. (The words echo Truman Capote’s dismissal of Jack Kerouac’s “spontaneous” prose: “It’s not about writing, it’s about typing.”)
In 1970s and 80s New York, Bartlett was one of the first artists of his generation to make a living. She was sometimes extravagant, sometimes not, and her budget was never part of her vocabulary. and families in need. She was also one of the first to do business directly with an out-of-town dealer, rather than through a New York agency.
As New York’s attention faded in the 1990s, she built an extensive network of galleries in other cities, where she presented numerous new shows. From 1994 to 2021 she had more than 20 solo exhibitions, usually accompanied by catalogs, at The Rocks in Philadelphia alone.
Bartlett took a 20-year hiatus from shows at Paula Cooper starting in 1996. During that period, she rarely exhibited in New York, and when she did, she usually flitted from gallery to gallery. Her work appeared to be more popular and sold well outside the New York art world. In 2016, Ms. Bartlett resumed her show with Ms. Cooper, who joined forces with Ms. Boesky in 2018.
Ms. Bartlett was stylishly dressed, opinionated, and a very prolific artist. Despite seeming to spend a lot of time lying on the couch with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in one hand, she said she would go insane if she couldn’t work. Work done: Painting, printmaking, drawing, especially in pastels, and designing furniture, glassware, and jewelry, with limited forays into set and costume design.
So she found time to read voraciously. I have a long and interesting interview. Writes her autobiographical novel The History of the Universe. It has played a major role in redesigning and furnishing three substantial residential residences in New York City, two in Lower Manhattan, a large loft on Lafayette Street and a cast-concrete industrial building on Charles Street. She added an intricate garden (designed by Madison Cox and a lap pool on the top floor) — one of the former Union Halls at Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
Married to a German actor Mathieu Carriere, from 1983 to 1993, she lived half the year in a large apartment in Paris. The apartment was almost entirely decorated in a modernist design by a Finnish architect. Alvar Aalto —In the building where “Last Tango in Paris” was filmed, he hardly spoke to the visitors.
Ms. Bartlett has been as methodical in her life as in her art. Arriving in New York in the late 1960s, she eschewed bohemianism and instead wore pearls, sweaters her sets, tartans her wool poodles her skirts. For a long time, starting in the late 1970s, she wore only Zoran’s minimalist fashion, and later Ronald’s Shamask fashion. She kept her hair short and bangs, with little change.
She loved the list. Her novel incorporates several. At the beginning of her career, she created a list of art ideas and marked those she thought other artists “owned”. And she often talked about the list in a slightly curt, ironic monotone.
At the beginning of the 1985 interview, Bartlett’s friend and fellow painter Elizabeth Murray asked her what she was thinking when they met in 1962 as students at Mills College in Oakland, California. She replied: Bartlett, Bach’s Cello Suite, Cézanne, Going to Graduate School, Going to New York, Albert Camus, James Joyce”
She was born Jennifer Ann Roche on March 14, 1941 in Long Beach, California, to Edward and Joanne (Chaffee) Roche. Her father was an entrepreneur whose main business was a pipeline construction company. Her mother attended Otis Her Art Institute in Los Angeles and worked as a fashion illustrator until the birth of her children.
The eldest of four children, Jennifer was precocious. She has been painting constantly since her childhood. She loved the ocean and she swam regularly (she also painted large paintings of sea creatures). She was inspired by her mother’s single artbook on French Post-Impressionism. Inspired by a Van Gogh exhibition she saw in Los Angeles, she emerged from her high school determined to become a painter.
After graduating from Mills College in 1964, Bartlett married Stanford University alumnus Edward Bartlett, and the two went on to graduate school at Yale University. He majored in medicine and she majored in art. (They divorced her in 1972.) At Yale’s School of the Arts, current students, recent graduates, and their friends have some of the most ambitious and competitive artists of her generation. was included. Bryce Marden, Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, Chuck Close, Linda Benglis and Nancy. Graves. After moving to Green Her Street in Soho in the late 1960s, she became friends with artists Joe Zucker, Jonathan Borofsky, John Treano, Joe Brainard, and Alan Sallett, and began working with her in a loft on Her Street in Spring, New York. held his first solo exhibition.
When she arrived in New York, Bartlett was developing a system on graph paper, inspired by the art of leading conceptualist Sol LeWitt. One day, she said in her Archives interview, she realized that the signs on the New York City subway had “endured a lot of punishment.” she said she did.
The sign-based 12-inch-by-12-inch plate had the added convenience of being a small unit that was easy to work with, pack, and transport, but it also had the potential to be enormous when installed. She liked the lasting “freshness” of enamelled steel, she said. It doesn’t physically age or look obsolete. She discarded her previous paintings when she began manufacturing her steel plates at a small New Jersey manufacturing facility.
Her gridded plates express Bartlett’s fascination with the dynamics of painting and, like her two magnificent plate works, Recitative (2007) and Song (2009-10), she used them for the rest of their lives. .
She also expanded her material. Her next big project after ‘Rhapsody’ is ‘In the Garden’, a dilapidated garden behind a small villa in Nice, France, where she spent her winter of 1979-80. It consists of nearly 200 drawings of her. These works formed the basis for large paintings, including plates, oil on canvas and enamel on glass, as well as several different types of prints.
“In the Garden” was also important. Because Ms. Bartlett spent her life, especially eventually working in familiar environments that included the studio, her home and her own garden. 1991-92 “Air: 24 Hours” consists of her 24 large canvases, each depicting her in one of these locations at a specific time of her day. She painted her own living space again from her 1992 to her 1993 with her 24 Hours: Elegy. It usually included her daughter’s clothes and toys. In these works, hand-painted grids are densely stacked to create a grainy atmosphere reminiscent of those created by Georges Seurat’s dots.
In 2012, the “hospital picture” was born as a result of weeks in hospital, described by her daughter Carriere as “a series of undiagnosed symptoms”. 10 canvases. Each was punctuated by a thick line of arbitrary color running from end to end.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Bartlett was survived by her younger sister, Julie Roche Matsumoto.
Overconfident and independent, Bartlett was often asked about her views on feminism, as when she joined The Archives of American Art in 2011. In which case she replied: She just wanted to be the best artist. ”
