His death was announced by the Paula Cooper Gallery Y Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City, who represent her. A Paula Cooper Gallery spokeswoman, Sarah Goulet, said Ms Bartlett was ill but did not give a specific cause.
Finding inspiration in a seemingly ordinary house, a simple sailboat, or the grim view from her backyard, Ms. Bartlett saw endless variety in common scenes. She often painted the same object dozens or even hundreds of times in melancholy or jubilant, figurative or abstract works. The scale of his pieces varied along with the tone: while many of his paintings were done on large canvases, other works were huge mosaics of steel tiles, filling an entire gallery as they spread across the walls and around the windows. corners.
“Jennifer blazed a trail for younger artists, especially women artists, with the idea of doing really monumental-sized installations with paint,” Klaus Ottmann, curator of the Phillips Collection in Washington, said in a 2013 interview with the new york times.
Late in her career, Mrs. Bartlett painted scenes of her garden, seen from the hospital where she was recovering in Manhattan and a pointillist image of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But she remained best known for an earlier, more conceptual work: “Rhapsody,” a collection of 987 painted steel plates that filled the Paula Cooper Gallery when it was first shown in 1976. Times art critic John Russell opened his review of the facility by saying calling him “The most ambitious piece of new art that has come my way since I started living in New York.”
Instead of using a traditional canvas, Mrs. Bartlett fabricated one-foot-square steel plates that she baked with white enamel. She then added a motif that became one of her trademarks, silk-screening a pale gray grid that she used to organize her images. Finally, he added or subtracted abstract marks or geometric shapes (triangles, squares, circles, lines) or painted more elaborate images (a house, a tree, a mountain, the ocean), using every color of enamel paint that was sold on the market. time by Testors, an art supply company.
As a whole, “Rhapsody” was both playful and philosophical, serving as a sort of catalog of the motifs, styles, colors, and shapes available to modern painters. “Mastering it from start to finish is a singular adventure,” Russell wrote, “and by the time we’ve reflected on the 54 different blues that have been included in the final section of ‘Ocean,’ we will have expanded our notions of time. and of memory, and of change, and of painting itself.”
Ms Bartlett said she made up the piece as she went along, intending it to play out as a conversation “where people get sidetracked from one thing and maybe get back on topic, and then do the same with The next”. The installation was later acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which exhibited “Rhapsody” in its atrium.
One of four children, Mrs. Bartlett was born Jennifer Ann Losch in Long Beach, California, on March 14, 1941. Her father owned a construction company and her mother was a former fashion illustrator. Ms. Bartlett sought to build a different life for herself, constantly drawing as a child and dreaming, even at age 5, of moving to New York to become a painter. After watching Disney’s animated film “Cinderella,” she drew the fairy-tale princess some 500 times, she said, “all the same but with different hair colors and dresses.”
Ms. Bartlett studied painting at Mills College in Oakland, California, graduating in 1963. She continued her art education at Yale University, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1964 and an MFA the following year. Her teacher Jack Tworkov, an abstract expressionist, introduced her to young experimental artists, including Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg, whose work opened Ms. Bartlett to new directions in modern art.
as she said later“I came into my life.”
While in graduate school, she married Ed Bartlett, a medical student. For a time, she commuted between her home in New Haven, Conn.; her art studio in Manhattan; and the University of Connecticut, where she taught and slept in her office. That arrangement proved untenable and she, after a few years, divorced and settled in SoHo, where she became part of an artistic community that included Richard Serra, Mandrel Close and Jonathan Borofsky, who lived across the street.
“Art at that time had to be new,” he told Bomb magazine in 2005. “You had to take the next step.” To distinguish himself from his peers, he would search for found objects in the neighborhood (“rubber stoppers, plastic tiles, pieces of string, red plastic teapots”) and bake, freeze, throw, paint, and turn them into works of art. . Inspired by subway signs, he then turned to steel plates.
By the mid-1980s, she was one of the country’s foremost artists, with a retrospective of her work opening at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and traveling across the country. She was photographed for Vogue and Vanity Fair, she was featured in The New Yorker and began dividing her time between New York and Paris, where she lived with her second husband, German actor Mathieu Carrière, before they married. hers would end in divorce.
He also ventured into poetry and prose, publishing an autobiographical novel called “Historia del Universo” (1985). “The skin on the soles of my feet is rough,” she wrote in an impressionistic passage. “I lean towards alcohol, anxiety, nervous stomach, moods, wavering optimism and inflammatory infections. I have been analyzed without success, although we both tried; the same goes for marriage.”
At the same time, he continued to undertake ambitious large-scale art projects, including site-specific commissions for the lobby of a federal court building in Atlanta and the ceiling of a Buddhist temple in Japan. Since then, her work has been acquired by institutions such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Tate Modern in London.
Survivors include a daughter from his second marriage, Alice Carrière, and two sisters.
When Mrs. Bartlett rented a villa on the French Riviera in the late 1970s, she began drawing and painting her view outdoors, eventually making nearly 200 images for a series called “In the Garden.” Her later projects included “Sea Wall” (1985), an installation of ship paintings and sculptures that stretched more than 35 feet; “AIR: 24 Hours” (1991-92), which featured a frame for each hour of the day; and “Recitative” (2011), an installation of 372 painted steel plates that recall the historical work that launched her to fame.
“Instead of refining things, I just do more,” he says. told People magazine, explaining his serial approach to art. “Looks like I can’t make one of something.”