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Lot Essay
Graceland Mansions is a continuous sequence of five separate abutted sheets in five different print media: drypoint, aquatint, screenprint, woodcut, and lithograph (from left to right). In each section the same simplified cube-like house — a primal image of a house like that in a Monopoly game — is seen from varying angles of vision. Nevertheless, there is a certain symmetry in the conception: we see the central house at eye level, its jutting corner bisecting the whole composition and the shadow suggesting that the sun is directly overhead. By contrast, to the two prints at either end, we look down at the house from above and the shadows are cast inward toward the center of the composition. As the eye moves left or right over the five panels, it seems that we move around the house, or the house revolves. The shifting shadows in the sequence of panels may be read as alluding to the different times of day. (A series Bartlett print of 1978 involving the image of a house is entitled Day and Night.)
The colors employed are consistent from sheet to sheet but the choice of medium and the patterns of its application vary, each of the five sections having its own distinctive surface texture and reflecting the light in its own way. The drypoint lines are tightly wound into little spirals that form dots somewhat like the dot-like strokes in a pointillist painting. The silkscreen marks are stenciled on in neat patches resembling the composition of cork or a terrazzo floor. The woodcut panel is an optically active openwork grid that suggests transparency and depth.
This ambitious print evolved out of an eighty-part serial painting of the same title on Square enameled steel plates. It is one of a number of Bartlett's serial paintings whose theme is the primitive image of a house and whose title is an address with fond associations for the artist; Graceland Mansion was the home of singer Elvis Presley.
Jennifer Bartlett's work is, in part, a response to the austerities of “minimal” and conceptual art (see Sol Lewitt’s series; cat. nos. 122-131). Her use of different media within one work is related in idea to Jasper Johns’s earlier print Scent (cat. no. 97), but the way she contrasts them is not as understated. The repertory of styles — an idea Bartlett has developed further in recent work — reminds one of Picasso's eclecticism in his later years and of the restless progress many twentieth- century artists have made through a succession of artistic styles in one lifetime.
Clifford S. Ackley, The Modern Art of the Print: Selections from the Collection of Lois and Michael Torf, p.92
The colors employed are consistent from sheet to sheet but the choice of medium and the patterns of its application vary, each of the five sections having its own distinctive surface texture and reflecting the light in its own way. The drypoint lines are tightly wound into little spirals that form dots somewhat like the dot-like strokes in a pointillist painting. The silkscreen marks are stenciled on in neat patches resembling the composition of cork or a terrazzo floor. The woodcut panel is an optically active openwork grid that suggests transparency and depth.
This ambitious print evolved out of an eighty-part serial painting of the same title on Square enameled steel plates. It is one of a number of Bartlett's serial paintings whose theme is the primitive image of a house and whose title is an address with fond associations for the artist; Graceland Mansion was the home of singer Elvis Presley.
Jennifer Bartlett's work is, in part, a response to the austerities of “minimal” and conceptual art (see Sol Lewitt’s series; cat. nos. 122-131). Her use of different media within one work is related in idea to Jasper Johns’s earlier print Scent (cat. no. 97), but the way she contrasts them is not as understated. The repertory of styles — an idea Bartlett has developed further in recent work — reminds one of Picasso's eclecticism in his later years and of the restless progress many twentieth- century artists have made through a succession of artistic styles in one lifetime.
Clifford S. Ackley, The Modern Art of the Print: Selections from the Collection of Lois and Michael Torf, p.92