BARTLETT IN A MAJOR ART PERSPECTIVE

Whatever the appearance of Jennifer Bartlett’s works, passion has fueled thought and thought has guided passion for the artist who critics are hailing as one of the most important in America today.

Although schooled in a minimalist aesthetic, Bartlett introduced into her paintings recognizable and emotionally charged images from her personal life, which evoke potent responses in viewers.

Her recent works, although unabashedly romantic, are nevertheless, organized by her according to systematic principles of format and medium.

A major exhibit of nearly 140 of Bartlett’s works since 1970 opens today at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.

The extensive show follows the artist’s evolution from systematic, reductive abstraction to romantic, painterly realism. The works are diverse, ranging from abstract patterns of dots in a limited palette of white, yellow, red, blue, green and black on baked enamel steel panels, to works that combine paintings and drawings of recognizable sites with three-dimensional objects that are surprising in their ordinariness, like chairs and little houses and boats.

It is surprising to many observers that this international art star should have come from as prosaic a community as Long Beach.

Born in 1941, Bartlett passed her upper-middle-class childhood by the Pacific Ocean in which she swam almost daily. (Water has appeared consistently as a motif in her works.) Her young years were conventional--she was even a cheerleader at Long Beach High School--but she always felt temperamentally out-of-place and was regarded as a non-conformist.

She decided early--her mother says at the age 5--to go to New York to be an artist, even though she lacked any apparent natural talent for representational drawing.

“I knew that I wanted to be an artist and it always seemed clear to me that I’d leave Long Beach for New York. It was that clear and simple. When I was growing up there was very little of an art scene. The Van Gogh show at the L.A. County Museum was a highlight. Now more is happening. . . .

“I just wanted the most I could get . . . I haven’t rejected California, but my commitment is to my profession. If you wanted to be a movie star you wouldn’t move to Montana. New York is the center of the art world. It’s more abrasive but it’s also more entertaining than any other place.”

On her way to New York she picked up a bachelor’s degree at Mills College in Oakland, which she entered in 1960. This “Vassar of the West” traditionally had (and still has) distinguished faculties in the arts.

“Jennifer was a real worker. We all knew at Mills that Jennifer had the drive to become a success in New York,” said La Jolla painter Carla Saunders, who was a former class- and studio-mate of Bartlett.

After Mills College, the aspiring artist entered Yale University in 1963. The graduate School of Art and Architecture there, always distinguished albeit conservative, had been directed in the 1950s toward modernism by Bauhaus-veteran Josef Albers. Yale was then regarded as an anteroom to New York.

She received her master’s degree in fine arts in 1965 and began a half-dozen-year period of commuting to teaching jobs and to New York, where she finally moved permanently.

Recognition came in 1976. At the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, Bartlett exhibited “Rhapsody,” a mammoth work composed of 988 square feet of enamel painted steel plates which formed a grid installation 7 feet, 6 inches high and 153 feet long. New York Times critic John Russell wrote at the time that the work “enlarges our notions of time, and of memory, and of change, and of painting itself.” “Rhapsody” summarizes Bartlett’s development as an artist up to the time of its execution and is, according to Russell, “a concise history of 20th-Century art.”

Since “Rhapsody,” success for Bartlett has seemed inescapable. She has exhibited throughout the world and her works are represented in major museum, private, governmental and corporate collections. “Rhapsody” was purchased in its entirety by a private collector, to the surprise of both artist and dealer.

Last April, a retrospective of Bartlett’s works opened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Since April the retrospective, simply called “Jennifer Bartlett,” has traveled to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., and the Brooklyn Museum in New York and will go to the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh after it closes March 23 in La Jolla.

The exhibit includes “Rhapsody,” which is on loan from the collector and needed a specially constructed gallery at the La Jolla Museum.

Bartlett, who is married to European movie actor Mathieu Carriere, gave birth to a daughter last August. She anticipates changes in her work as a result of being a mother but cannot now foresee what they might be. “One’s ambition for oneself changes when someone else becomes No. 1 in your life.”

Despite Bartlett’s history of success and the acclaim that has generally greeted her retrospective, some critics (in the Wall Street Journal, for example) have questioned the artist’s abilities as both painter and thinker. “I’m not comfortable reading either positive or negative things about my work,” she confesses. “One really learns from reading criticism of other artists.”

She adds diffidently, “I just do what I can do. The thing is to make any problems I have as an artist work for me.”