Morton Bartlett (1909 in
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
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– 1992 in
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
) was an American freelance photographer and graphic designer who, from 1936 to 1963, devoted much of his spare time to creating and photographing a series of intricately carved lifelike plaster dolls. He never formally exhibited his work, though a small circle of friends and acquaintances was aware of its existence. Only upon his death in 1992, when the contents of his estate were purchased by New York art and antiques dealer Marion Harris, did his artistic creations become more widely known to the general public.
After cataloguing all the sculptures and photographs, and publishing FAMILY FOUND - The Lifetime Obsession of Morton Bartlett, Marion Harris exhibited the work, organized exhibits and placed his work in museums including The Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Life
Morton Bartlett was born on 20 January 1909 in
Chicago, Illinois
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and orphaned at the age of 8. He was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Warren Goddard Bartlett, a wealthy couple from
Cohasset, Massachusetts
Cohasset is a town in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States. As of the 2020 census the population was 8,381.
History
Cohasset was inhabited for thousands of years by Native Americans prior to European colonization, from whom English c ...
. Morton was enrolled at
Phillips Exeter Academy
(not for oneself) la, Finis Origine Pendet (The End Depends Upon the Beginning) gr, Χάριτι Θεοῦ (By the Grace of God)
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and later spent two years, 1928 to 1930, studying at
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
. After dropping out, possibly due to financial hardships brought on by the Great Depression, Bartlett struggled to earn a living. He passed through a succession of jobs, ranging from crafts magazine editor and gas station attendant to making gift cards and running a printing business. Following service in a US Army engineering unit during WWII, Bartlett took up freelance graphic design and photography, designing catalogs for M. Scharf and Co., a Boston-based toy distributor. He never married, though he may have once been engaged to a woman living across the street from him in Cohasset, Mass. where the two ran a business together during the late 1940s.
[Johnson, Ken."The Man Who Played With Dolls".''The Boston Globe''. July 29, 2007.][Smith, Roberta."Doll, You Oughta Be in Pictures". August 8, 2007.]
Works
In 1936, at the age of 27, Bartlett began the personal hobby that would hold his interest for the next 27 years: dollmaking. He had no formal training in sculpture, but by making use of books on anatomy and medical growth charts he was able to create, first in clay and then cast in plaster, at least 15 half-sized likenesses of children (there may have been more but these are the only ones known to remain). Twelve of them are girls, ranging roughly in age from prepubescence to adolescence, and three are boys, of approximately eight years of age and bearing some resemblance to the artist himself.
[Saltz, Jerry."Substitute for Love".''Village Voice''. May 2000.] The dolls were made with detachable arms, legs and heads, allowing for a variety of different poses.
[Simmons, Laurie."Guys and Dolls - the life and works of Morton Bartlett".''ArtForum''. Sept 2003.] They are accurately scaled, depicting his compulsive attention to detail. Bartlett took photos of the dolls in lifelike situations, either nude or wearing hand-made clothes.
Outsider Art Sourcebook
', ed. John Maizels, Raw Vision, Watford, 2009, p.44
Bartlett's hobby received public mention twice in his lifetime. The first came in 1957 in the 25th Anniversary Report of Harvard's 1932 graduating class, in which he wrote: "My hobby is sculpting in plaster. Its purpose is that of all proper hobbies - to let out urges that do not find expression in other channels." The second came in April 1962 when ''Yankee Magazine'' ran a two-page spread of photographs featuring nine of Bartlett's dolls dressed in costumes representing various ethnic heritages. The article, written by Michael A. Tatischeff, was titled "The Sweethearts of Mr. Bartlett".
Although untrained in art, he worked in sculpture and
photography
Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed ...
. Bartlett first began to make his dolls in 1936, the same year that
Hans Bellmer
Hans Bellmer (13 March 1902 – 24 February 1975) was a German artist, best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer.
Biography
Be ...
's book ''The Doll'' was published in Paris. Over the following 25 years, Bartlett carved and dressed numerous sculpted dolls (about 15 have survived), and created a photographic record of them which amounts to about 200 B&W photographic prints and 17 colour slides. He was also a collector of anatomy books. The dolls and photographs were found after his death, and have since been shown in books and gallery exhibitions.
Bartlett made the last of his dolls in 1963. Forced to relocate from his Bay Village studio on 15 Fayette Street in Boston that he had occupied for more than a decade, he wrapped his dolls in newspaper and packed them away in custom-made wooden boxes. He moved to Boston's South End where, as far as is known, he never again worked on or photographed any of the dolls in his collection.
Bartlett is widely considered an
outsider artist.
Rediscovery
In 1993, New York arts and antiques dealer Marion Harris discovered the dolls for sale at the Pier Show, a New York antiques fair, along with 200 staged B&W photos of the dolls. She purchased the entire collection and later published a catalog of Bartlett's work titled ''Family Found: The Lifetime Obsession of Morton Bartlett''
Popular culture
His dolls inspired
Jake
Jake may refer to:
Name
* Jake (given name), including a list of persons and fictional characters with the name
* Katrin Jäke (born c. 1975), German swimmer
* Jake (gamer), American ''Overwatch'' player and coach
Animals
* Jake (rescue dog), a s ...
and
Dinos Chapman (the
Zygotic
A zygote (, ) is a eukaryotic cell formed by a fertilization event between two gametes. The zygote's genome is a combination of the DNA in each gamete, and contains all of the genetic information of a new individual organism.
In multicellula ...
sculptures, circa 1995). In early 2008, one of the dolls sold at auction for $110,000 U.S.
References
Bibliography
* Harris, Marion (1994). ''Family Found: The Lifetime Obsession of Morton Bartlett''.
* Kittelmann, Udo/ Susanne Zander/ Claudia Dichter (1999). ''Obsession: Morton Bartlett, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Henry Darger, Paul Humphrey''.
* Turner, R. and Klochko, D (2004). ''Create And Be Recognized: Photography On The Edge''. Chronicle.
* Kittelmann, Udo and Claudia Dichter (2012). ''Morton Bartlett. Secret Universe 3''.
External links
''New York Times'' 08.08.2007"Substitute for Love". ''ArtForum'', May 2000"Guys and Dolls". ''ArtForum'', Sept 2003Morton Bartlett at ''Hamburger Bahnhof''. secret universe III. 11 May - 14 October 2012
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bartlett, Morton
1909 births
1992 deaths
Outsider artists
Harvard University alumni