New York painter dies at 81 – ARTnews.com

Jennifer Bartlett, whose experiences in subjecting painting to predetermined rule systems earned her a loyal following, has died at the age of 81. Gallery actress Paula Cooper, who gave Bartlett some of her early performances, confirmed her death.

Bartlett’s paintings are quite different from any others painted by artists of her generation, and for this reason, they have always made her a special artist in the eyes of many. She found unique ways to adapt abstraction to the era of minimalism without turning to conceptual art. At the same time, she also did the tricky balancing act of working in a semi-abstract fashion without leaving photography completely behind.

Its topics are widely varied. I’ve created abstract ideas arranged in vast epic grids spanning massive walls as well as more attractive smaller images. She painted seemingly everyday images of hospital halls and dazzling landscapes made up of lattice patches of paint. So it produced One of the few photos of the 9/11 attacks that clearly depicts today’s events.

“One of the most famous painters of her generation, Bartlett seamlessly combined the polished aesthetic of simplicity with expressive and emotional painting, leaving a great variety of work,” Paula Cooper Gallery and Marian Bosque Gallery, their New York representatives in a joint statement.

Bartlett’s breakthrough was considered by many critics as fascination (1975–76), a grid arrangement of graphics that, when fully installed, span more than 150 feet of space. Some images combine to form simple natural elements such as a mountain or ocean, while others evoke an elegant juxtaposition of swirling lines. The piece as a whole represents “everything,” as Bartlett once said.

The work is emblematic of Bartlett’s unusual drawing process. I avoided canvas for baked steel plates, all 12″ square, and enamel oil paint, which is more commonly associated with hobbies than fine art. The pieces were individually produced at Bartlett’s studios Long Island and Manhattan, and you’ll make a decision within a day of making them whether or not you like them. Although their photos often seemed banal, she spent hours in libraries researching the nature they depicted.

For its exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery, fascination It was seen as a big business. The New York Times Critic John Russell The piece is called “The most ambitious solo work of new art that has come my way since I began living in New York.”

When it was introduced in 1976, Sidney Singer, a collector from Westchester who had not yet created a large collection, bought the work as a whole for $45,000, an amount equal to 1985 New Yorker Profile personly Bartlett described him as “astronomer”. (She didn’t want to divide the work and “didn’t really think it could be sold as is”).

Singer later sold the painting, and it was purchased in the 1990s for more than $1 million to Edward R. Broida, a real estate developer, who later devoted his time to collecting artwork. She kept a portion of that relatively large sum, which came at a time when she had no official representation at the show. Before His death in 2006Broida gave nearly 200 works, including fascination, to the New York Museum of Modern Art, which gave him a stature in an airy atrium while remodeling his 2019 collection.

Jennifer Bartlett was born in 1941 in Long Beach, California, to a father who was a construction company owner and a mother who was a fashion painter. Her parents had a specific vision for her: “I think my mother would have loved if I had a job at Hallmark Cards, painted some portraits on the side, happily married, had some kids, and lived in Long Beach,” Tell People. But Bartlett’s goal was to move away, to New York, and become an artist there.

Having actively cultivated her own interest in drawing, and portraying Cinderella hundreds of times as a child, she studied art at Mills College in Auckland as an undergraduate. She then went to Yale University to earn an MFA and met medical student Edward Bartlett, whom she married. Their marriage eventually fell apart when Jennifer tried to gain a foothold on the New York scene while Edward focused on his career in Connecticut.

In Manhattan, Bartlett kept a studio in Soho, and became friends with artists such as Elizabeth Murray, Jonathan Borowski, and Barry Leva. In 1970, she made her New York debut in the apartment of Alan Sarett, who at that time was a famous artist. It featured some of her early work made by specifically avoiding certain colors—”I didn’t feel the need at all for orange or violent, but I needed green,” as Calvin Tomkins once told—and to combine and recombine these hues using innovation systems.

“What was she doing? seem Like conceptual art: she used mathematical systems to locate her points,” Tomkins wrote. “But the results—all those bright, clutchly colored dots that jump and form in clusters on the grid—never seemed conceptual.”

Bartlett put it herself more clearly in 2013 an interview with the The New York Times: “Grid isn’t an aesthetic thing, really. It’s a way of organizing. I like to organize things. Anything.”

Comparisons between Bartlett’s art of the 1970s and other art forms are popular. Critic Hal Foster has drawn parallels between these paintings and music. Others saw an alignment between Bartlett’s writing – she wrote a 1985 memoir titled universe history– And her paintings. But Bartlett herself ignored any of these comparisons.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Bartlett achieved a level of fame that at the time was rare for female painters in the United States. She received a coveted spot in the 1977 edition of Documenta in Kassel, Germany, and in 1980 her work featured in the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 1985, she had a retrospective that started at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and traveled across the country. Paula Cooper, one of New York’s top dealers, would go on to make many shows for Bartlett, as well as the Luxe Philadelphia Fair that began in the 1990s.

Her work took an increased interest in the natural world. Her 1980–83 seriesIn the garden“It was the result of trying to photograph a garden in a villa in Nice, France, about 200 times, with each showing from a different perspective. I also began working on large-scale commissions, including The Pacific Ocean (1984), a 30-foot painting of waves crashing into the shore for AT&T executed in a realistic style, sometimes making it appear as a camera-made image.

Oceans and beaches would become recurring themes in her work, most notably her re-emergence in the 2007 series “Amagansett,” which features views of that Long Island township superimposed with seemingly vibrating webs.

The passage of time was another concern that appeared frequently in Bartlett’s art. Her 1991-1992 series “AIR: 24 Hours” is a cycle of paintings attempting to paint a day in and around Bartlett’s Manhattan studio. Dancers roll across the street at 5 a.m.; The box is emptied at 11 am; Koi fish curling up under lily pads at 5 p.m. Perspective shifts abound.

Along the way, she didn’t stray from the formula that made her famous, as a 158-foot-long piece appeared that looked like fascination At the PES 2011 exhibition entitled Narrativelauded as “a deeper meditation on the digital age than any number of purported digital artworks” by Jeff Frederick in art in america. A retrospective featuring works similar to this one appeared at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Parish Museum of Art two years later.

Despite any arrogant notions art historians have attached to Bartlett’s paintings, her process has always been described as somewhat intuitive.

She told painter Elizabeth Murray during bomb an interview in 2005. “It’s not going to happen. The only person that has to happen for it is me. That’s what I was supposed to do.”