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Bartlett shows her colors: a conceptualist by origin, a painter at heart, and, increasingly, a rollicking storyteller, Jennifer Bartlett has recently received wide attention for work both old and new

Art in America, Jan, 2007 by Vincent Katz

Jennifer Bartlett s lifelong commitment to widely varied, always ambitious painting is finally again drawing the attention it merits. Three recent exhibitions provided an opportunity to review her artistic development since the mid-1970s and to assess where she is right now. In the fall of 2006, the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass., put on "Jennifer Bartlett: Early Plate Work," an exhibition of the artist's work on square enamel plates from 1968 to 1976. Also this past fall, the Locks Gallery in Philadelphia showed her recent plate pieces and oil-on-canvas paintings; in 2004, Locks had shown three of her large-scale works, from 1979, 1984 and 1985. While not a complete overview--Bartlett did much experimenting in the two decades between 1985 and 2005--these three exhibitions allowed one to see how far she has traveled, and intimated where she might go next.

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Bartlett came of age in the late 1960s. She studied at Mills College, where she met Elizabeth Murray, and Yale, where her fellow students included Chuck Close and Jonathan Borofsky. While she was a student, Minimalism was the leading movement; in 1967, Sol LeWitt's essay "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" appeared in Artforam. Bartlett was very much a product of her times artistically. At the age of 27, she made the decision to do all her work, for the next several years, on 1-foot-square, 16-gauge steel panels; they look like very thin flooring tiles. She ordered the panels, faced with baked white enamel, from an industrial manufacturer. Then she had each panel silkscreened with a grid that approximated the graph paper on which she was doing much of her drawing. The silkscreen grid divides each panel into 1/4-inch squares--2,304 of them.

Her main painting technique for the next several years was to dab a single point of paint into some of these tiny squares. For each piece, a set of rules would dictate where she would apply the dots. The painting was done by hand, precisely; the colored dots were made as large and circular as possible without touching the lines of the grid. She limited herself to Testor enamels, generally associated with hobby painting, using all 25 basic colors both as they came and variously mixed. Her reliance on fixed procedures was consistent with trends in the New York art world of the late 1960s. Among other artists in Minimalism's wake who worked with logical systems and serial units were Robert Ryman, Borofsky and Mel Bochner. But chance also played a role in some of Bartlett's early paintings on panels. The particular decision-making method she chose--a random drawing of numbered slips of paper to determine the location of her painted dots--was influenced by John Cage's methods of chance determination in his musical compositions. As could be seen at the Addison, Bartlett's rules for her pieces resulted in varied, unpredictable works.

The first museum exhibition,, devoted to this body of work, "Jennifer Bartlett: Early Plate Work was curated by Allison N. Kemmerer; the accompanying catalogue includes an insightful essay by Brenda Richardson. Kemmerer did an expert job of selecting 24 from over 125 early plate pieces. Although Bartlett often restricted her range of colors and sometimes worked with just the primaries, from the beginning she was capable of creating lush effects from those limited means. There is something irreverent, slyly jolting, that gives her Conceptual series a certain lightness. It was fascinating to see how she used a variety of means to work against the mute physicality of the plates, hung directly on the wall by common brads.

Some pieces are made of only two panels; by contrast, Rhapsody (1975-76), the summation of the early plate work (of which more below), is an epic cycle of 987 plates. Each arrangement asks for a different reading strategy. In Series VIII (Parabolas), 1971, the eye can scan in a variety of ways the columns into which the 36 plates are divided, while a work such as Four Right Angles (1972) requires the viewer to read it from left to right, as the four angles found in each of the first four plates of a row are combined in the fifth plate, though there are vertical continuities too.

In addition to plate pieces, there was a handful of works on graph paper at the Addison, in which Bartlett appeared to be methodically testing color possibilities. Some plate pieces used rule-based processes in a visually static way to lay out color options offered by mixing and juxtaposing the Testor enamels. Looked at now, these feel like background works; they served a function for the artist, but they are plodding compared with the other plate pieces, in which the artist's intellect and graphic skill race each other to greater heights.

For example, in Series VIII (Parabolas), a preordained arrangement of preselected color dots evolves into a much less predictable set of densely patterned screens that can give the effect of television or computer monitors on the fritz. Even a piece such as Series XVIII (Grids), 1971, which explicitly pays homage to the grid, uses color combinations and rhythms to move into a realm that is neither Minimalist nor strictly Conceptual. It shows that for Bartlett, logical processes can yield highly decorative, even whimsical results. Many of the plates in Series XVIII (Grids) could be used as decorative patterns by a sophisticated textile designer.

Bartlett shows her colors: a conceptualist by origin, a painter at heart, and, increasingly, a rollicking storyteller, Jennifer Bartlett has recently received wide attention for work both old and new

Art in America, Jan, 2007 by Vincent Katz

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