Jennifer Bartlett (1941 – 2002) is considered one of our most important American artists, whose work and career has spanned decades, and has evolved with changing aesthetics and methodologies. Her work, beginning with her earliest paintings, has been identified with the grid as the organizational armature for her compositions. These structures recall the patterning of Pointillism and later, that of the stricter Minimalism, however Bartlett’s paintings evolve to incorporate iconographic landscape elements, such as horses, trees, and hills. While Bartlett’s grid patterns retain structure and order in her paintings, they subtly provide a background upon which Bartlett’s vocabulary of subjects undulate in, out, and around her grid compositions.

Jennifer Bartlett was born in 1941 in Long Beach, California. She received her B.A. from Mills College in Oakland California, in 1963, where she also had her first solo exhibition during her senior year. Bartlett was influenced by a number of artists at Mills College, where Fernand Léger, Max Beckmann, and Clyfford Still had taught in the graduate school at various times. Bartlett then went on to Yale School of Art and Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut, where she received her B.F.A. in 1964 and her M.F.A. in 1965. Bartlett’s work is included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; the Tate Gallery, London, England; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.