Word: bartlette
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Their passions, crystallized by a stolen kiss in the middle of a poppy field, are initially quashed by Lucy's rather repressed chaperone/cousin, Charlotte Bartlett (Maggie Smith), who regards the kiss as nothing less than a violation of Lucy's honor--as well as a stain upon her own reputation as Lucy's escort...
Some works of art fall with a sweet click into the desires of a public whose existence their makers hardly suspected. Square pegs in square holes, they become landmarks of a kind. Thus it was with the work that made Bartlett's reputation, Rhapsody, 1975-76. It consists of 988 images, each done in model- airplane paint on an identical square of white-enameled steel. There are --to oversimplify this strangely permutational work, which fills a whole gallery in the present exhibition--four figurative motifs (house, tree, mountain, sea), three abstract ones (square, circle, triangle), three kinds of drawing (freehand...
Twining these elements into narrative strings, running up crescendos of motifs and replaying them on different instruments of drawing, Bartlett played fast and loose with the old saw about art aspiring to the condition of music, even if the fugue was thin and scratchy in parts. The work's elaborately systematic nature pleased those who took system as an index of virtue in art. But because the system was full of quirks, and especially because it depicted something--landscape, which is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel--other viewers, tired of the dry oats...
...feelings are real enough. They speak of a need for location in the world--in light, wind, water, all the shimmering epidermis of experience. Bartlett, after all, is a native Californian. Her titles almost always suggest places (At the Lake, At Sea, Swimmers Atlanta) or actual addresses (2 Priory Walk, 123 E. 19th Street). For some viewers, at least, her maturity as an artist begins with an outpouring of drawings and paintings around 1980, all on the same subject: the garden of a rented house in the south of France, an unremarkable scene of a small rectangular pool surrounded...
Nothing could be more banal, but Bartlett attacked this motif from dozens of stylistic angles and levels of attention, from Dufyesque silhouettes of color to gaudy calendar-art cliches, from cautious realist scrutiny to Warholian transcriptions of holiday-snapshot cropping. Sometimes the scene is light and sun-drenched, sometimes it is drowned in bloom and speckles, or elided by pastel smudges, or darkened into an eerie nocturnal calm. There is no favorite medium; Bartlett uses gouache, watercolor, ink, pastel, crayon, oil and pencil with almost equal facility...