JENNIFER BARTLETT R.I.P.

Jennifer Bartlett is one of my all-time favorite artists, who I'm surprised to learn was less than a  year older than me. She seemed so much more mature than me to me when I was around her in 1970s downtown Manhattan. When I encountered her soon to be most famous artwork—RHAPSODY—at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1976 I felt high from the magnificent originality of it, and embraced in a sensual joy from its achievement.

It was controversial from the get go because of its too-muchness. Made from hundreds of small square tiles, combined to create patterns or scenes or not, in ways that you could dig up close as  separate artworks or step back and get a bigger pattern or scene and then even more by stepping back further. I went back to immerse myself in it day after day while the exhibit lasted. Dragging my kids and lovers and friends to it too.

I wrote about it, but this was the pre-computer and social media era and I can't remember where it might have been published (but it may be in my archives at NYU). To me it was and is perfect, but even the person who wrote the intro to the coffee table book about it, Roberta Smith, called it "imperfect" (which came out in 1981 and I still cherish my copy, signed by Jennifer, though it's no substitute for a full immersion in the whole piece).

I loved her writing too and remember her reading at Saint Mark's an interminable list of the brand names of various products that I slowly realized was a completely unique new way of writing an autobiography. She was one of a kind (as I guess we all are) and I'm sorry to hear of her passing, though it sounds like it was for the best. Rest In Painting, and poetry, Jennifer Bartlett.