Jennifer Bartlett

Jennifer Bartlett ( Losch; March 14, 1941 – July 25, 2022) was an American artist and novelist.

She was best known for paintings and prints that combine the system-based aesthetic of conceptual art with the painterly approach of Neo-Expressionism.

Many of her pieces were executed on small, square, enamel-coated steel plates that are combined in grid formations to create very large works.

Bartlett was born Jennifer Losch 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.

In the late 1960s, influenced by the work of John Cage, she started bringing chance elements into her work.

Her realistic works favored mundane subjects, such as modest houses.

Her installations often consisted of multiple canvases as well as three dimensional objects.

She attended Mills College in Oakland, California, graduating with a BA in 1963.

During her college years, she met Elizabeth Murray, who became a lifelong friend.

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 MFA in 1965.

Bartlett described the experience of study at Yale as her broadest influence: "I'd walked into my life".

One writer noted that a central paradox of her work was that Bartlett took the controlled, rationalist grid often favored by conceptual artists and used it to release an evocative torrent of imagery that was much in common with the Neo-Expressionist work of the 1980s.

A few critics found her work shallow, overly focused on surface, and weakened by its eclecticism.

According to critic Roberta Smith, Rhapsody is an epic achievement that brought together elements of photorealism, geometric abstraction, and pattern painting while also prefiguring 1980s Neo-Expressionism.

It is so large that Bartlett commented that she never saw the piece as a whole until its first public exhibition.

Bartlett said of Rhapsody that it "opened the wall up instead of closing it down. It looks bigger than it really is.... It’s my way of making edgeless paintings."

It has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (New York).

Subsequent series such as In the Garden and Amagansett have become more painterly while still retaining their systematizing rigor.

In 1980, Bartlett began to work on a complex print project in collaboration with master printers in Japan.

She had several retrospectives and survey exhibitions, the first in 1985 originating at the Brooklyn Museum (New York) and with 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 subject matter consists of variations on what Bartlett felt were the basic elements of art: four universal motifs (house, tree, ocean, mountain), geometric forms (line, circle, triangle, square), and color (25 shades).

The seven sections are entitled "Introduction", "Mountain", "Line", "House", "Tree", "Shape", and "Ocean".

Rhapsody has been called an "extended portable mural" and a "post-painting painting" that "took the American art world by storm".

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 her work.

Most critics perceived Bartlett's work as inventive, energetic, wide-ranging, and ambitious, and she was considered one of the two best painters of the postminimalism generation.

In a 2005 interview with the painter Elizabeth Murray, she gave this list of things that she said had been on her mind as a first-year art student:

Among Bartlett's early influences were Arshile Gorky, Piet Mondrian, and Sol LeWitt; particularly LeWitt's Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.

Bartlett was 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; indeed, she commented that she did not accept a distinction between figurative and abstract art.

LeWitt’s “rules” for conceptual art and the exactitude of LeWitt’s method and his definitive use of programmatic strategies and forms is manifest in her life-long devotion to geometric form.

She often worked in serial form or created polyptychs, and she frequently devised rule systems that guide the variations within a given group of works, requiring viewers 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".