Jennifer Bartlett is known for her inventive, personal, and richly expressive paintings. Born and raised in California, Bartlett studied painting at Mills College in Oakland, California; and Yale University, receiving her MFA at Yale in 1965. Three years later, Bartlett moved to New York City, where for several years during the 1970s she taught at the School of Visual Arts. Her early style, rooted in Abstract Expressionism, soon gave way to grid-based compositions reminiscent of Minimalist and Conceptualist art. The artist, already noted for her subversive interpretations of these movements, made her mark on the New York art world in 1976, when she exhibited her first major piece, a monumental assemblage of 988 painted steel plates entitled Rhapsody (1975-76, private collection in 1990).

By the late 1970s figurative elements began to appear regularly in Bartlett's work. The artist's grid format became largely subsumed by expressive new landscape compositions, and during the early 1980s she commenced a series of lush images of houses, pools, and gardens. Recognized as an important figure in the developing trend toward Postmodern figurative painting, Bartlett earned a number of awards, prizes, and public commissions. In recent years, she has returned to the grids and Abstract Expressionist elements of her early career while maintaining the intense, subjective quality of her work of the 1980s and 1990s.

Completed in 1992, the Currier's 11 P.M. (Air Series) is the last of twenty-four canvases that together make up Bartlett's Air Series. Like much of her work, the Air Series is personal in nature. Consisting of images and vignettes drawn from her home in New York City, each canvas associates its subject with the hour of the day for which it is named. In 11 P.M. Bartlett depicts a tabletop still life featuring a collection of handwritten notes and an assortment of crumpled bills and pocket change. The ghost of the artist's earlier grid format breaks through in various places, while a "floating" set of children's drawings, a watch face, and an incongruously placed cat further dispel the composition's illusionistic qualities.

At once dreamlike and descriptive, 11 P.M. provides the viewer with a sense of both the external and internal life of the artist. The notes on the table, "reminders" expressed as quasi-cryptic phrases, are only fully decipherable by Bartlett; yet the fragmented pieces of information they embody, -"mostly turp for 2nd ground medium…"; "always start any new cycle with midnight…"; "Hiroshi new camera…";- nevertheless provide the viewer with insights not only into Bartlett's art, but into her thought processes as well. The small pile of money represents the mundane balance of the day's transactions, but it is also expressive, perhaps, of the artist's ambition, a personal characteristic noted by her critics. Adding further layers of complexity is the host of associations raised by the different denominations she chooses to depict: ranging from the Almighty Dollar itself to the two-bit quarters and even less worthy nickel and dime pieces, the artist seems to invite philosophical musing on the intertwined nature of art as aesthetic experience, fashion statement, and raw commodity. More poignant is the inclusion of the children's drawings and the clock face in the lower left corner. Seemingly pushed to the margins by the piled-up paperwork of a busy and successful career, the diminutive drawings remind the viewer that Bartlett is also a mother who is under pressure to "make time" for her children. Seen in another way, the clock indicating the title of the canvas itself, 11 P.M., shows that in one sense, Bartlett is indeed "making time" for her children in the form of a lasting legacy of painting. Although enigmatic and contradictory (as suggested by the presence of the standoffish cat below), 11 P.M. is ultimately rewarding, both as a technically accomplished painting and a convincingly authentic personal document.

11 P.M. (Air Series) was purchased by the Currier Museum of Art in 1992.

VSD

REFERENCE

Marge Goldwater, Roberta Smith, and Calvin Tomkins. Jennifer Bartlett. Ex. cat. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; n.d.