Jennifer Bartlett at Robert Miller - Brief Article

Art in America, April, 1999 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

At 987 square feet, Jennifer Bartlett's Rhapsody is more generous in area than the average one-bedroom apartment in New York. It is no less generous in spirit, as it charts the domain of modern painting with unmatched inclusiveness. The work of a then-35-year-old artist with mainly group shows to her credit, Rhapsody debuted at Paula Cooper Gallery in 1976 and was immediately hailed as a powerful summa of a century's worth of ideas about advanced painting. The piece traveled triumphantly for two years, with stops including Documents 6 and the Whitney's landmark "New Image Painting" show. A second museum tour followed in 1985-86. Then, like Rosenquist's F-111, Chicago's The Dinner Party or Serra's Tilted Arc, Rhapsody became an art-book legend, an oversized milestone, inconvenient and unseen.

Last winter, Robert Miller Gallery brokered the sale of Rhapsody by its first and only owner, Sid Singer (who bought it before the Cooper show closed), to collector Edward Broida (who bought it before the Miller show opened). While Broida considers various plans to have it placed on extended public display, Bartlett's work went on view for two months, its 153-foot length wrapped around the walls of Miller's L-shaped annex. The narrow and angled presentation encouraged close examination, though it also foreclosed a full panoramic reading of the whole. Still, Rhapsody emerged as rich as ever, vividly documenting the reengagement with history and representation undertaken by younger artists in the 1970s, and sufficiently limber to accommodate an unanticipated new reference--digital imaging--within its ample matrix.

Rhapsody unfolds as a modular mural of 1-foot-square, enamel-on-steel plates, each painted by Bartlett after first being surfaced with white and silkscreened with a quarter-inch grid of gray lines. The hand-friendly size of the constituent units tempers the monumentality of the whole, rather like Nancy Spero's contemporaneous wall-sized drawings composed of dozens of sheets of paper. The plates constitute a chartlike array of figurative and abstract possibilities that are grounded in fundamentals. There are basic shapes (circle, square, triangle), simple images (tree, house, boat, mountain), and plates which elaborate the connections between the two (as in Cubist rhyming, a triangle may become a sail, a rooftop or a mountain). Forms are rendered clean-edged or sketchy; some are outlined, others filled in as solid or pointillist fields. Diagrams of curves and line segments resemble protractor-on-graph-paper exercises of high-school geometry. A few punctilious landscape vignettes mimic the lifeless precision of a paint-by-numbers kit. Most of the plates work as separate units, though one big house occupies 49 of them, and a long black graphic gesture snakes down seven plates like a map of the Amazon.

The format evokes associations from commercial tiling, to the art of LeWitt and Ryman, to the Macs and cows of Warhol's wallpaper. Quartered targets summon up Robert Delaunay, bright hatchwork Johns. Homage is paid to avant-garde disciplinarians like Seurat, Cezanne and Malevich, even as once-mutually exclusive esthetics cheerfully conjoin (echoing the "both/and" which Robert Venturi was advancing at that time as a replacement for the "either/or" of modernist architecture).

What did we forget since last seeing Rhapsody? The fleshy pinks and browns, the surprising thinness of the plates, the pleasure of the lustrous surface. If, in 1976, the artless house and mountain forms posed the bluntest challenge to the authority of abstraction, today the watery blue expanses seem to make the bravest declaration, as they freely endorse nature, joy and mystery in art. And, again, there is the artist's essential generosity. Even though critical absolutism is largely a relic of the past, Bartlett's informed ecumenism remains no less liberating today.