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 Neo-expressionism is a style of Late modernism, late modernist or early-Postmodern art, postmodern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s. Neo-expressionists were sometimes called ''Transavantgarde'', ''Junge Wilde'' or ''Neue Wild ...

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

Early life and education

Bartlett was born Jennifer Losch in 1941 in

Long Beach, California Long Beach is a coastal city in southeastern Los Angeles County, California, United States. It is the list of United States cities by population, 44th-most populous city in the United States, with a population of 451,307 as of 2022. A charter ci ...

, 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. She attended

Mills College Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland, California is part of Northeastern University's global university system. Mills College was founded as the Young Ladies Seminary in 1852 in Benicia, California; it was relocated to Oakland in ...

Oakland, California Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, California, Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major We ...

, 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 New Haven is a city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound. With a population of 135,081 as determined by the 2020 U.S. census, New Haven is the third largest city in Co ...

to study at the Yale School of Art and Architecture at a time when

minimalism In visual arts, music, and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in the post-war era in western art. The movement is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and modernism; it anticipated contemporary post-mi ...

was the dominant style. She studied with

Josef Albers Josef Albers ( , , ; March 19, 1888March 25, 1976) was a German-born American artist and Visual arts education, educator who is considered one of the most influential 20th-century art teachers in the United States. Born in 1888 in Bottrop, Westp ...

, 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". 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: :Being an artist, Ed Bartlett, Bach cello suites, Cézanne, getting into graduate school, getting to New York,

Albert Camus Albert Camus ( ; ; 7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French philosopher, author, dramatist, journalist, world federalist, and political activist. He was the recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the s ...

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (born James Augusta Joyce; 2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influentia ...

. I’d drawn constantly since childhood: large drawings of every creature alive in the ocean; Spanish missions with Indians camping in the foreground, in the background Spanish men throwing cowhides over a cliff to a waiting ship; hundreds of Cinderellas on five-by-eight pads, all alike but with varying hair color and dresses. Among Bartlett's early influences were Arshile Gorky,

Piet Mondrian Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (; 7 March 1872 – 1 February 1944), known after 1911 as Piet Mondrian (, , ), was a Dutch Painting, painter and Theory of art, art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He w ...

, and

Sol LeWitt Solomon "Sol" LeWitt (September 9, 1928 – April 8, 2007) was an American artist linked to various movements, including conceptual art and minimalism. LeWitt came to fame in the late 1960s with his wall drawings and "structures" (a term he pref ...

; particularly LeWitt's ''Paragraphs on Conceptual Art''.
Feature: Jennifer Bartlett’s Writing

Work

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 Geometry (; ) is a branch of mathematics concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. Geometry is, along with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. A mathematician w ...

form. She often worked in serial form or created

polyptych A polyptych ( ; Greek: ''poly-'' "many" and ''ptychē'' "fold") is a work of art (usually a panel painting) which is divided into sections, or panels. Some definitions restrict "polyptych" to works with more than three sections: a diptych is ...

s, 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". In the late 1960s, influenced by the work of

John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one ...

, 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. ''House with Open Door'' from 1988, in the collection of the

Honolulu Museum of Art The Honolulu Museum of Art (formerly the Honolulu Academy of Arts) is an art museum in Honolulu, Hawaii, Hawaii. The museum is the largest of its kind in the state, and was founded in 1922 by Anna Rice Cooke. It has one of the largest single co ...

, consists of an oil paint on canvas diptych and the same house constructed out of wood. The Dallas Museum of Art, the

, the

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum). LACMA was founded in 1961 ...

, the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an Encyclopedic museum, encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the List of largest museums, third-largest museum in the world and the List of larg ...

, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...

(New York City), the

Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) is an List of art museums#North America, art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at ...

, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery in London, housing the United Kingdom's national collection of international Modern art, modern and contemporary art (created from or after 1900). It forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Live ...

, 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. 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. She had several retrospectives and survey exhibitions, the first in 1985 originating at the

Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum in the New York City borough (New York City), borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 500,000 objects. Located near the Prospect Heig ...

(New York) and with more recent ones in 2011 at the

(New York) and 2014 at the Parrish Art Museum (New York).

Early experimental work

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.

''Rhapsody'' (1975–76)

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". According to critic Roberta Smith, ''Rhapsody'' is an epic achievement that brought together elements of

photorealism Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium. Although the term can b ...

, geometric

abstraction Abstraction is a process where general rules and concepts are derived from the use and classifying of specific examples, literal (reality, real or Abstract and concrete, concrete) signifiers, first principles, or other methods. "An 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

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

''At Sea, Japan'' (1980)

In 1980, Bartlett began to work on a complex print project in collaboration with master printers in Japan. The result was ''At Sea, Japan'', a waterscape printed on paper whose 6 panels span 8 feet in width. The image is built up from 96 screenprints and 86 color

woodcuts Woodcut is a relief printing technique in printmaking. An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with Chisel#Gouge, gouges—leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts ...

''In the Garden'' series (1979–83)

''In the Garden'' is a series of over 200 drawings (and later paintings and prints) that all take as their subject the garden behind a villa in

Nice Nice ( ; ) is a city in and the prefecture of the Alpes-Maritimes department in France. The Nice agglomeration extends far beyond the administrative city limits, with a population of nearly one million pastels A pastel () is an art medium that consists of powdered pigment and a binder (material), binder. It can exist in a variety of forms, including a stick, a square, a pebble, and a pan of color, among other forms. The pigments used in pastels are ...

and gouaches executed in a range of styles, and many are diptychs or

triptych A triptych ( ) is a work of art (usually a panel painting) that is divided into three sections, or three carved panels that are hinged together and can be folded shut or displayed open. It is therefore a type of polyptych, the term for all m ...

s. She later made her backyard garden in Brooklyn, New York, the focus of a similar series of diptychs.

''Sea Wall'' (1985)

With ''Sea Wall'', Bartlett brought together

oil painting Oil painting is a painting method involving the procedure of painting with pigments combined with a drying oil as the Binder (material), binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on canvas, wood panel, or oil on coppe ...

and sculpture. The piece consists of a large painting of houses and boats on a dark ground, in front of which are placed sculptural versions of those same objects.

Digital painting (1987)

In 1987, the

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

invited Bartlett as one of six international artists, including

David Hockney David Hockney (born 9 July 1937) is an English Painting, painter, Drawing, draughtsman, Printmaking, printmaker, Scenic design, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considere ...

and Sidney Nolan, to work digitally on a

Quantel Paintbox The Quantel Paintbox was a dedicated computer graphics workstation for composition of broadcast television video and graphics. Produced by the British production equipment manufacturer Quantel (which, via a series of mergers, is now part of ...

. The series was called ''Painting With Light'' and, though she was at first reluctant, she grew to enjoy her first attempt at

digital painting Digital painting is either a physical painting made with the use of digital electronics and spray paint robotics within the digital art fine art context or pictorial art imagery made with pixels on a computer screen that mimics artworks from th ...

and discussed the implications of this new medium as she worked.

''Air: 24 Hours'' (1991-92)

A collaboration between Bartlett and the fiction writer Deborah Eisenberg, ''Air: 24 Hours'' first appeared as a book of 24 paintings by Bartlett with accompanying text by Eisenberg. Each paintings shows a scene in Bartlett's house at a particular hour of the day.

''Amagansett'' series (2007–08)

Around 2004, she began including fragments of text — phrases, bits of dialogue, dreams — in some of her paintings. ''Amagansett'' is a series of oil paintings that take the ocean, skies, and seaside landscapes of

Long Island Long Island is a densely populated continental island in southeastern New York (state), New York state, extending into the Atlantic Ocean. It constitutes a significant share of the New York metropolitan area in both population and land are ...

as their subject. They are painted in a distinctive cross-hatched style in a limited palette favoring blues, greens, grays, and browns. Some pieces are diptychs in which Bartlett explores the shifts visible in a landscape between two moments of time or seen from two slightly different angles of view.

''History of the universe: A novel''

After her first novel, ''Cleopatra I-IV'' (1971), published by The Poetry Project in an edition of 300 copies (unpaginated and unbound), Bartlett's massive experimental

novel A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The word derives from the for 'new', 'news', or 'short story (of something new)', itself from the , a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ...

''History of the universe: A novel'' was published by Nimbus Books on January 1, 1985. Like

Andy Warhol Andy Warhol (;''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''"Warhol" born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director and producer. A leading figure in the pop art movement, Warhol ...

's later published The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989) it is a book that mixes, with a surfeit of detail, stream-of-consciousness and traditional narrative; recounting a series of Bartlett's memories, impressions, and descriptions of family, art world individuals and conversations. Like ''Cleopatra I-IV'', the book is divided into sections, and each is marked by one of Bartlett’s photograph. It is both banal and colorful: sometimes representational, sometimes abstract. In it, Bartlett alternates between a first- and third-person voice to address and recount the subjects of family, marriage, career, friends, and death. Peter Schjeldahl,

Ron Padgett Ron Padgett (born June 17, 1942) is an American poet, essayist, fiction writer, translator, and a member of the New York School (art), New York School. ''Great Balls of Fire'', Padgett's first full-length collection of poems, was published in 1969 ...

, and other members of the poetry community that gathered at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery encouraged Bartlett to join them in reading her precise inventory of personal events and habits aloud, and she found an audience receptive to her literary minimal art work there. An excerpt from ''History of the universe: A novel'' was included in the 2014 book ''Jennifer Bartlett: History of the Universe (1970-2011)'' that was published by Parrish Art Museum containing texts by Klaus Ottmann and Terrie Sultan.

Commissions

In 1981, Bartlett created ''Swimmers Atlanta'', a 200-foot multimedia mural for the Federal Building in

Atlanta Atlanta ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of municipalities in Georgia (U.S. state), most populous city in the U.S. state of Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia. It is the county seat, seat of Fulton County, Georg ...

, Georgia. Thereafter she completed commissions for

Volvo The Volvo Group (; legally Aktiebolaget Volvo, shortened to AB Volvo, stylized as VOLVO) is a Swedish multinational manufacturing corporation headquartered in Gothenburg. While its core activity is the production, distribution and sale of truck ...

AT&T AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

, Saatchi & Saatchi, Information Sciences Institute, and

Battery Park The Battery, formerly known as Battery Park, is a public park located at the southern tip of Manhattan#Manhattan Island, Manhattan Island in New York City facing New York Harbor. The park is bounded by Battery Place on the north, with Bowling ...

Personal life and death

After marrying medical student Ed Bartlett in 1964, she commuted between the

Soho SoHo, short for "South of Houston Street, Houston Street", is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Since the 1970s, the neighborhood has been the location of many artists' lofts and art galleries, art installations such as The Wall ...

district of New York City and

, where she taught at the

University of Connecticut The University of Connecticut (UConn) is a public land-grant research university system with its main campus in Storrs, Connecticut, United States. It was founded in 1881 as the Storrs Agricultural School, named after two benefactors. In 1893, ...

. Following her 1972 divorce, Bartlett moved to New York City full-time and began teaching at the

School of Visual Arts The School of Visual Arts New York City (SVA NYC) is a private for-profit art school in New York City. It was founded in 1947 and is a member of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. History This school was started by Silas ...

. In 1983, she married German actor Mathieu Carrière with whom she had a daughter, Alice Carrière, the author of the Spiegel & Grau memoir ''Everything/Nothing/Someone'' that recounts the author's challenging life in their household. They divorced in the early 1990s. She lived in both

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

and

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

. As of 2014, she resided full-time in Amagansett on

. Bartlett died from

acute myeloid leukemia Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a cancer of the myeloid line of blood cells, characterized by the rapid growth of abnormal cells that build up in the bone marrow and blood and interfere with haematopoiesis, normal blood cell production. Sympt ...

at her home in Amagansett on July 25, 2022, aged 81.

Selected exhibitions

* Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 1976. ''Rhapsody''. * Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1978. ''New Image Painting''. * Clocktower Gallery, New York, 1979. *

Whitney Biennial The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932; the first biennial was held in 1973. It is considered ...

, 1981. *

Walker Art Center The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill, Minneapolis, Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in ...

, Minneapolis, MN, 1984. *

, New York, 1985. ''15 Year Retrospective''. Touring retrospective. * Walker Art Center, 1986. Touring exhibition. * Orlando Museum of Art, 1993. Touring retrospective of prints. * Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, 1994. ''Recent Works from the AIR: 24 Hours Series''. * Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, 2000. ''Islands and Oceans''. * Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, 2004. ''At Sea''. * Addison Gallery of American Art, 2006. ''Early Plate Work''. *

Pace Gallery The Pace Gallery is a contemporary and modern art gallery with 9 locations worldwide. It was founded in Boston by Arne Glimcher in 1960. His son, Marc Glimcher, is now president and CEO. Pace Gallery operates in New York, London, Hong Kong, ...

, New York, 2011. ''Recitative'' (2009–10). * Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, 2011. ''The Studio Inside Out''. *

, New York, 2011. ''Rhapsody'' and other works. * Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, 2012, ''Addresses'' (1976–1978)" * Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, 2013, ''Chaos Theory'' * Parrish Art Museum, 2014. ''Jennifer Bartlett: History of the Universe — Works 1970–2011''. Touring survey. * Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, 2015. ''In the Garden'' * Paula Cooper Gallery, 2016.

Honors and collections

Bartlett was a recipient of the 2019 Francis J. Greenburger Award. Bartlett received the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1983 and the

American Institute of Architects The American Institute of Architects (AIA) is a professional organization for architects in the United States. It is headquartered in Washington, D.C. AIA offers education, government advocacy, community redevelopment, and public outreach progr ...

Award in 1986. She was elected into the National Academy of Design in 1990 and became a full member in 1994. Bartlett's work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the Tate Gallery (London), Benesse Museum (Naoshima) and other institutions. Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster '' Some Living American Women Artists'' by Mary Beth Edelson.

References

External links

''Jennifer Bartlett'' at Marianne Boesky Gallery''Jennifer Bartlett'' at Locks GalleryJennifer Bartlett works at the Metropolitan Museum, New York''At Sea Japan'' (1980) at the Tate Museum''Surface Substitution on 36 Plates'' (1972) at the Tate MuseumArchives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: Oral history interview
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Bartlett, Jennifer 1941 births 2022 deaths 20th-century American painters 20th-century American printmakers 20th-century American women painters 21st-century American painters 21st-century American women painters American women printmakers Deaths from leukemia in New York (state) Deaths from acute myeloid leukemia Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Mills College alumni Neo-expressionist artists Painters from California People from Amagansett, New York Artists from Long Beach, California School of Visual Arts faculty Yale School of Art alumni