Jennifer Bartlett
Jennifer Bartlett (March 14, 1941 – July 25, 2022) was an American painter, printmaker, and novelist known for works that blend conceptual system ideas with a painterly, expressive style. Born Jennifer Losch in Long Beach, California, she grew up near the ocean and studied at Mills College (BA, 1963) before earning an MFA at Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1965, where she learned from artists like Josef Albers and Richard Serra. Bartlett’s art often used a grid-based system on enamel-coated steel plates, which she arranged into large, multi-panel works. She believed in merging representational subjects—houses, gardens, oceans—with abstract and geometric forms.
Her best-known work is Rhapsody, a monumental mural-like piece made from thousands of square tiles, exploring motifs such as house, tree, ocean, and mountain; it is held by the Museum of Modern Art. She also created other influential series, including In the Garden and Amagansett, which blend detailed, painterly scenes with strict grid logic. Bartlett explored chance and three-dimensional forms, and she even experimented with digital painting in 1987. She published a novel, History of the universe: A novel (1985), and collaborated with Deborah Eisenberg on Air: 24 Hours. Bartlett taught at the University of Connecticut and the School of Visual Arts, lived in New York, Paris, and Amagansett, and received numerous awards, including the Francis J. Greenburger Award (2019). She died of acute myeloid leukemia in 2022 at age 81; her work is in several major museums worldwide.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 21:42 (CET).