The artist Jennifer Bartlett’s “In the Garden” series, made from a dismal winter stay on the French Riviera, helped make her an art star.
In the winter of 1979, fresh off a monumental solo exhibit, painter Jennifer Bartlett traded homes with a writer in southern France. Her show three years prior at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York —, each of them one square foot in size but varying wildly in style — was still making waves. At the villa that her friend rented in Nice, the artist would begin work on an ambitious follow-up.
With its cinematic sweep, “In the Garden,” the resulting series exhibited in 1981 at Paula Cooper, won even higher critical acclaim than “Rhapsody.” But the show was only a first draft: Over the next two years, Bartlett went on to add paintings, prints and works in other media, each one an elaboration of an epic two-star review.a selection from this series on view at the Phillips Collection, features only a small fraction of the works Bartlett ultimately produced from 1979 to 1983.
Bartlett’s polyglot nature is apparent at first glance. “Wind” , an oil painting spanning five canvases, is an expressionist cycle of menacing cypress trees that resembles a sequence of blown-up film stills. Across the room, “In the Garden II, #1” comprises a cluster of smaller works on paper, canvas, plate and glass — a fauvist suite of dashed-off compositions.
Her disdain for the home swap in Nice is every bit as evident as her range. Central in most of Bartlett’s variations is a statue of a cherubic little boy urinating into the pool. In most compositions, this “manneken pis” is rendered as no more than a sorry thumb, a fixture for her gloomy ruminations. Even the more tender renderings of the villa have an acerbic note to them.
Phillips Collection chief curator emeritus Klaus Ottmann originally intended to pair Bartlett’s works with those of Pierre Bonnard, the fin de siècle postimpressionist painter who lived in Le Cannet, not far from where Bartlett stayed, and whose style Bartlett confidently aped at times. The two would have split the billing fifty-fifty.
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