Fluent, Electric, Charming

By ROBERT HUGHES

In museums, the rotunda used to be where the sculpture went--bulls and Greeks, and the Hiram Powers slave chastely displaying her fetters to the white copy of the Apollo Belvedere. The Brooklyn Museum, scorning such conventions, has turned its rotunda into a boat show. It is full of small craft of every kind, antic parodies and phantoms of seaside fun, not one of which will float. There is a dory made of concrete and a small runabout, or rather the Platonic ghost of one, made of glass reinforced with wire mesh; a sailing dinghy made of sheet copper; and a trio of bright blue, toylike sailing boats, one of them toppled as by a puff in the bathtub. There are also wooden fences, sheds and nondescript little structures of a vaguely maritime sort. The boats and sheds crop up again around the walls in big, lush paintings of bay shores and creeks, giving a mirroring effect: Are these paintings of real scenes, or of boat-sculptures and mock houses in a landscape, or what?

Such is the opening to Jennifer Bartlett's mid-career retrospective--the rotunda installation is her most recent work, Sea Wall, 1985--and it sets the tone of expectation very well. The large, the environmental and the obscurely systematized are here conflated with the small, the decorative and the pleasurable. It is as though the didactic strategies of conceptual art, its obsession with ordering and naming and listing, had been given play among the stereotypes of joie de vivre fixed a half-century or more ago by Henri Matisse and Raoul Dufy. At 44, Bartlett is almost the quintessential example of the New York 1970s artist who made it successfully into the much more worldly atmosphere of the 1980s. She is (rightly) seen as both serious and popular, no easy feat. That a colleague of such fiercely reductive artists as Brice Marden, Barry Le Va and Richard Serra, formed in the hot arguments and unheated lofts of a pre-yuppie SoHo, would emerge by the mid-'80s as a corporate muralist, decorating the Volvo headquarters in Goteborg, Sweden, and the dining room of the AT&T Building in Manhattan with her fluent, electric and inexorably charming images of landscape and sea--could any development be less predictable?

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, ruled, dots) and a wide but fixed number of standard colors, used straight from the can, never mixed on a palette.

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 of conceptual art, could gratefully latch on to Bartlett. If Rhapsody today seems a mite too garrulous and fiddly to be the masterpiece many critics take it for, it remains an essential key to the shift of taste that took New York art into the '80s. In a catalog essay to this show, Art Critic Roberta Smith puts her finger on the peculiar character of Bartlett's work: "a series of reflections--of the world, of other people's art . . . a sense of manic cerebralism and arbitrariness, a distance, even an indifference . . . riddled with sophisticated obviousness." The work is set up like an automatic mechanism, but hand-painted in a capricious parody of pictorial richness. A load of modernist signs for sensual delight--thick, ropy color that invokes the transparency of water, spots and scribbles betokening light, bits of Matisse interiors, Dufy ports, Bonnard trees, Monet ponds--is dumped on the eye and offered for identification as quotes. Bartlett's studio was one of the places where the '80s mania for "appropriation" began.

But the 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 by a low boxwood hedge, rhododendrons and a claustrophobic screen of dank, suburban cypresses.

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.

The result is a painter's parallel to Raymond Queneau's now classic Exercises in Style, in which an utterly inconsequential incident on a Paris bus is retold in 99 literary modes and rhetorical vignettes. The banality of the subject leaves the brilliance of the pastiche in high relief. So it is with Bartlett. The large canvases from In the Garden, such as Wind, 1983, and Pool, 1983 (the former with its grand, dark, ratty frieze of pines, the latter with its mysterious stainings and specklings of the pool bottom), are convincing proof that she can move beyond pastiche, into an area where painting takes on some of its traditional grandeur as the fully felt diction of the senses.