Jennifer Bartlett

Jennifer Losch Bartlett is an American artist, born in Long Beach, California in 1941. She is best-known for paintings combining abstract and representational styles.

Education

Bartlett attended Mills College in Oakland, California. While a student, she formed a friendship with the future mixed-media sculptor Elizabeth Murray. Bartlett received her BFA in 1963; she then traveled to New Haven to study at Yale School of Art and Architecture and received her MFA in 1965, at a time when minimalism was the dominant style. Bartlett's instructors included the artists James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Alex Katz, and Al Held. Bartlett has described the experience of study there as her broadest influence: "I'd walked into my life." [http://www.bombsite.com/issues/93/articles/2756/ Murray, Elizabeth. Bomb Magazine. "Jennifer Bartlett." Fall, 2005. Issue 93] Fellow Yale Art and Architecture alumni of the 1960s include the painters, photographers, and sculptors Brice Marden, Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, and Robert Mangold.

When asked by Murray in a 2005 interview about what she was thinking as a first-year art student, Bartlett replied: [Murray, Elizabeth, ibid.] :Being an artist, Ed Bartlett, Bach cello suites, Cézanne, getting into graduate school, getting to New York, Albert Camus, James Joyce. 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.

Career

Bartlett is best known for paintings and prints of mundane objects—especially houses—executing in a style that combines elements of both representational and abstract art. In 1981, she created a two-hundred foot mural for the Federal Building in Atlanta, Georgia.

Collections

Bartlett's work is represented in a number of public collections, including: The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Washington D.C.'s Smithsonian American Art Museum, London's Tate Gallery, Minnesota's Walker Art Center, The Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Virginia, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas, the Wake Forest University Fine Arts Gallery in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

References

ources

* Eisenberg, Deborah, "Air, 24 Hours, Jennifer Bartlett", New York, H.N. Abrams, 1994.
* Goldwater, Marge, "Jennifer Bartlett", New York, Abbeville Press, 1985.
* Katz, Vincent, "Bartlett Shows Her Colors", Art in America, January 2007, 106-111.
* Richardson, Brenda, "Jennifer Bartlett, Early Plate Work", Andover, Massachusetts, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, New Haven, distributed by Yale University Press, 2006.
* Scott, Sue A., "Jennifer Bartlett, A Print Retrospective", Orlando, Florida, Orlando Museum of Art, 1993.
* Van der Marck, Jan, "Reconnecting, Recent Work by Jennifer Bartlett", Detroit, Founders Society Detroit Institute of Arts, 1987.

External links

* [http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/bartlett_jennifer.html ArtCyclopedia]
* [http://www.bombsite.com/jenniferbartlett/jenniferbartlett.html Interview with Jennifer Bartlett]