Artist

Jennifer Bartlett

born Long Beach, CA 1941 - died Amagansett, NY 2022
Also known as
  • Jennifer Losch Bartlett
Born
Long Beach, California, United States
Active in
  • New York, New York, United States
  • Paris, France
Nationalities
  • American
Biography

Jennifer Bartlett is the daughter of a pipeline engineer and a fashion illustrator. In the late 1950s she attended MillsCollege, an unconventional school in Oakland, California, that encouraged experimentation and discouraged textbooks. Her senior work earned her a spot in Yale’s graduate art program, where she argued with everyone and worked her way through the “isms” of 1960s art. Bartlett labored in an industrial loft in New York’s SoHo district until her breakthrough in 1976, when a collector bought one of her grid paintings for forty thousand dollars. In 1985 she published a mock autobiography titled History of the Universe. Bartlett married Mathieu Carrière, a French actor, in 1980, and divides her time between France and New York.

Exhibitions

Media - 1999.80 - SAAM-1999.80_1 - 52092
Graphic Masters III: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
January 15, 2010–August 7, 2010
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Graphic Masters III: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the third in a series of special installations, celebrates the extraordinary variety and accomplishment of American artists' works on paper. These twenty-eight exceptional watercolors, charcoals, and drawings from the 1960s to the 1990s reveal the central importance of works on paper for American artists, both as studies for creations in other media and as finished works of art. Traditionally a more intimate form of expression than painting or sculpture, drawings often reveal greater spontaneity and experimentation. Even as works on paper become larger and more finished, competing in scale with easel paintings, they retain a sense of the artist's hand, the immediacy of a thought made visible.