Time Flies!

Greenwich Mean Time became England's standard on this day in 1676 and was adopted as the universal time standard in 1884.

Jennifer Bartlett may not have been thinking about the universal standard, but she was thinking about time. This scene in the artist's studio comes from a series of paintings representing hours of the day.

Clocks and grids mark the passage of time, while boxes are wittily configured to resemble a house, a frequent motif in Bartlett's work. Although traditionally the artist's studio seems a safe inner world, the newspapers represent a disturbing intrusion from the outside.

See Bartlett's painting in Modernism and Abstraction: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, through October 15, 2000.

Source: Modernism & Abstraction: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).

Pictured: Jennifer Bartlett, born 1941, Air: 24 Hours, Eleven A.M., about 1991–92, oil, 84 x 84 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Barney A. Ebsworth.