Jennifer Bartlett (1941-2022)
“IN THE GARDEN,” 1980
MURAL OF STEEL PLATES AND TESTOR’S PLA ENAMEL
LOCATION: VAN PELT-DIETRICH LIBRARY CENTER, 3420 WALNUT ST., FIRST FLOOR
The artist Jennifer Bartlett swapped houses with a writer friend in the winter of 1979-80, left her SoHo loft in New York City, and went with her sister to a ramshackle villa in Nice, the coastal city in the south of France. Bartlett was captivated by the view of the back garden featuring a rectangular pool with a statue of a cherub.
During their stay, Bartlett embarked on a project to sketch the scene on paper freehand, using various mediums including pencil, charcoal, ink, watercolor, pastel, and gouache. She produced nearly 200 drawings of the garden from varying perspectives, using a range of artistic techniques and styles. Working from the sketches, photographs, and her memory, she created what became the “In the Garden” series, from 1979 to 1983, which included paintings on canvas and murals made of enamel on steel plates.
“Jennifer Bartlett is probably one of the most important female artists of her generation,” says Lynn Smith Dolby, director of the Penn Art Collection. “I think these works really show the gift of the artist, to take something ordinary and to make it transcendent.”
Eugene Garfield, who earned a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1961 from Penn, commissioned a mural from Bartlett for the Institute for Scientific Information, a Philadelphia academic publishing service that he founded. The mural consists of 270 one-foot-square steel plates painted with enamel that when assembled creates five scenes of the garden, from different perspectives and at different times of day. The mural is “very emblematic of Bartlett's work,” Dolby says, “combining these elements of minimalism and conceptualism and abstract expressionism; it defies category in lots of ways.”
The entire work—10 feet 8 inches high and 33 feet 6 inches long—was installed in the Institute’s lobby. When Garfield donated the mural to Penn in 1999, the decision was made to break up the work into six sections that were installed in five locations on the first floor of the Penn Libraries’ Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center. It can seem like a bit of a treasure hunt to find them, ranging from a section of just 18 squares in a row over the circulation desk to two full scenes of the garden, side by side consisting of 96 squares high on a wall stretching between two floors in an atrium.
“In each one she seems to challenge herself to find a different view of the garden but maintain these elements in each one of them, what she calls the ‘leaky ornamental pool,’ the sculpture of the urinating cherub on the edge of the pool, and what she calls the ‘five dying cypress trees,’ behind,” Dolby says. “She describes it as an ‘awful little garden,’ but I see something different, I see something very sunny and beautiful.”
Another work in Jennifer Bartlett’s “In the Garden” series, an oil on canvas measuring 109 feet square, is on view in the atrium of the main first-floor space of Perry World House, on loan from Lisa and Richard C. Perry, a 1977 Penn graduate and a member of the University’s Board of Trustees.
