Morton Bartlett : Family Found

The Paris edition of the Outsider Art Fair took place at Atelier Richelieu,  from October 18 – 21,  2018.  One of the artists featured was Morton Bartlett.

Morton Bartlett? 

In many ways, Morton Bartlett’s art responded to his early loss of his family. Orphaned as a child and adopted by an upper-crust Boston couple, Bartlett attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College for two years, then dropped out and began to earn a living, primarily as a commercial photographer. It was in 1936 that, without friends’ or relatives’ knowledge, he initiated a hobby that consumed his spare time for almost thirty years. Studying medical manuals and books on the history of costume and photography, Bartlett learned to make plaster casts of anatomically precise dolls, at half life-size, which he painted and dressed in intricate clothing that he sewed himself. The ultimate creative act came when he photographed them in everyday scenes or posed in a dramatically illuminated studio. Bartlett worked privately, never intending to sell or exhibit his works. When a 1962 magazine article brought unwelcome interest from readers, the reclusive artist packed away his sculptures and related photographs, which remained hidden until after his death. 

Bartlett’s exacting manufacture meant that he sometimes spent an entire year on a single figure, producing only fifteen dolls in the course of his career, along with some two hundred black-and-white photographs that transcend the documentary. Shot from multiple angles and under varying lighting conditions, employing different costumes and wigs, the photographs animate their referents by a twofold operation: they help create a distance that masks the dolls’ artificiality while imbuing them with personalities and moods that unfold over time. In one series focused on a prepubescent girl, Bartlett balanced his doll on her out-turned left foot, poised to take flight. In several shots she acts the ballerina, wearing a diamond tiara, long dress, or tutu; in others, she models a bikini, a bonnet, even a seductively thin black veil.

 That film-inspired photographers Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons both own Bartlett’s prints attests to his resonance with what photo critic A. D. Coleman has termed the “directorial mode” of staged narratives featuring a glamorous female subject and focusing on identity construction, sexual awakening, and gender formation.

Kara Fiedorek. National Gallery of Art

Morton Bartlett was a private man whose passion was creating a fantasy family - a superlative group of perfectly sculpted children, aged mainly 6 -16, wearing meticulously hand-made clothes and specially constructed wigs. Dressed and posed, they were then photographed in staged scenarios, at once both quotidian and dramatic: reading in bed, at ballet class, scolding a toy dog, smiling sweetly, crying in disappointment, simply sitting at home or playing on the beach.

 This fantasy world crossed over into reality in 1963 when it became public, fleetingly, in a Yankee Magazine article. Although authorized by Bartlett himself, the attention and praise which followed surprised him, and led to this remarkable body of work being packed away, each child in its own container, to remain unseen for the next thirty years.

 Still wrapped in 1963 newspapers, it was discovered by Marion Harris who made the work public again in 1993 with an exhibit and accompanying catalogue, FAMILY FOUND. Since then Bartlett's work has received wide acclaim, and with his work in major museums and private collections, the story seemed to be as complete as his family.

 A group of original color slides by Morton Bartlett was discovered by a Californian collector who has produced the images as contemporary prints. These prints along with three of the sculptures and a selection of vintage black and white prints were included in The Sweethearts of Mr. Bartlett in 2007. Subsequently, Bartlett's work has reached a much wider audience through his first monographic exhibition held in 2012 at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and the Musee d'art Brut in Lausanne, as well as being prominently featured in the Rosemary Trockel retrospective at the New Museum in 2012.

Julie Saul Gallery

How did  Naomi Harris find the work of Morton Bartlett?

As remarkable as the Morton Bartlett discovery has turned out to be, it was made in an ordinary way. Bartlett’s work was at the Triple Pier Show in 1993, exhibited by Bruce Emond, The Village Braider. This was the first time I wasn’t actually exhibiting at the Pier Show, and without the opportunity of shopping at setup, I felt no urgency in being early.

 So instead, my husband and I had a long relaxing breakfast, arriving well after the show started, not expecting to find anything to buy.

The Bartlett works had been on display all during setup, as well as the morning of the show, generating much controversy and interest, but no sales by the time we got there.

 There were some assembled “dolls” on display, plus what seemed like multiple legs, arms and heads, as well as boxes and boxes of similar body parts. What was visible was captivating, eccentric, yet clearly accomplished. I have always related to dolls and mannequins and sensed there had to be a story and perhaps even more interesting things in the boxes. Emond explained, as I think he had endlessly since setup began, that it was the estate of a man in Boston who made dolls but not much else was known.

 I made a decision to buy the entire booth without really knowing the extent of my purchase. Immediately, and with obvious relief, a sign went up saying “Booth Sold Out.”

What is it that drew you to Bartlett’s work? What little things about him are you still discovering?

It took a year for us to assemble what would be 15 doll sculptures, several interchangeable heads along with handmade clothes and wigs, all in handmade wooden boxes, wrapped in fading 1963 issues of The Boston Globe, untouched since that time. In separate boxes, there were also more than 200 realistic photographs of the dolls meticulously dressed and posed in staged scenarios, at once quotidian and dramatic, creating a visual fiction of childhood; a young girl comfortably reading, practicing ballet or playing with her stuffed toy dog.

 We researched Bartlett’s history, gleaning details from his lifelong estate lawyer, doctor, neighbors and the Harvard Year Book of 1932, discovering that he made the photographs himself and carried them with him; they were a fantasy family.

 Importantly, and an added key to his story, we established that it seemed as if he made the dolls and clothes only in order to photograph them.

Was it hard building the Bartlett market? When did you know you had succeeded?

We produced a 60-page catalog called Family Found, now available on Amazon. And a short film showing this process with the same title can be seen on YouTube.

 The first exhibit was at Sandy Smith’s Fall Folk Art Show, shortly followed by the Outsider Fair in 1995. The interest and press response was huge, almost overwhelming… and so was criticism of the unusual and controversial work.

 Sales were alarmingly slow, although we sold out of Family Found catalogs!

 Disappointed but undaunted, because we believed in the quality and originality of the work, we reprinted the catalog and spent the next five years strategically introducing his work to collectors and museums. Interest grew slowly and the turning point was when the Metropolitan Museum bought the work for its permanent collection in 2000.

Coupled with press interest, the Met purchase transformed the visibility and credibility of Bartlett’s work. Now, it is mainly in private or museum collections and there is a waiting list for when they very occasionally come back on the secondary market. Vintage photographs are almost equally rare. In order to meet the continuing demand, we produced a limited edition of ten of the most popular images in 2010.

 Since then, Morton Bartlett’s work has been in several major exhibits internationally, including the Venice Biennale in 2013. He is considered iconic in the Outsider art field.

Q&A: Marion Harris.  By Greg Smith.  Antiques and the Arts Weekly,   November 21, 2017

Most children own a doll of some kind. Maybe an action figure, a stuffed furry bear, a porcelain princess. Some of these dolls wind up on shelves like proto-works of art, but others remain close to their owners, serving in the roles of partner-in-crime, confidante, bedmate and best friend. The inanimate creatures come to life in the eyes of their guardians, taking on the personality traits, fantastical and ordinary, ascribed to them.

Most of us, however, eventually leave our childhood playthings and their imaginary personas behind. Maybe it’s a matter of physically growing out of them, realizing with more clarity the improbability of our blossoming relationships. Or we just get occupied with other things, like people — real people. And as for the few adults who seriously engage with dolls later in life, they’re often looked upon with furrowed eyebrows and a watchful gaze.

Perhaps this general suspicion is why Morton Bartlett, despite spending countless hours constructing and photographing incredibly lifelike dolls of children, died without mentioning them. The 15 dolls, and some 200 photographs depicting them, were discovered by antique dealer Marion Harris in 1993. She bought them on a whim at the Pier Show, a big New York antiques fair, and was told they were removed from the house of a man recently deceased in Boston’s South End.

There are three boy dolls in total; the rest are girls, approximately aged 8 to 16. Made with the help of medical growth charts and anatomy books, their proportions are entirely accurate. The detail is astounding, with toenails and fingernails and teeth and tongues just as they should be. The girls contain fully realized genitalia. The boys do not. Both genders are dressed up in outfits expertly stitched and knitted. Their body parts are removable, so the dolls could change outfits without causing a mess. In spite of all this precision, though, Bartlett’s dolls still look like dolls — not people.

What kind of a man would devote years of his life — from 1936 to 1963, approximately one year per doll — to such an uncanny passion? The answer, at least according to Bartlett, is a relatively conventional one.

Bartlett was born in Chicago in 1909. He was orphaned at the age of 8, and adopted by a well-to-do family in Boston soon after. He received a top quality education, first at Phillips Exeter Academy and then at Harvard University for two years before dropping out. He worked some odd jobs — gas station attendant, furniture salesman — before settling into a career in graphic design and commercial photography.

Two years after Harris discovered Bartlett’s trove of dolls, she brought them to the Outsider Art Fair in Manhattan. While the uncanny tale of the found, masterfully crafted works fit the usual “outsider” bill, the story of the artist did not. Bartlett was not some eccentric loner locked in his home, isolated from the world. His friends swore he didn’t express any deviant sexual tendencies or inclinations. He was highly educated, lived in Boston and worked in a creative field. His normalcy only makes his one “transgression” all the more mystifying.

Regardless of his relatively normal biography, Bartlett has been hailed as an outsider genius, his work mentioned in the same breath as Hans Bellmer or Henry Darger. And though Bartlett’s dolls were well made, it was his photographs that, many argue, capture the height of his craft.

Small, black-and-white photographs, dramatically lit, feature the dolls — and some human subjects — in hauntingly innocent scenarios. A girl of around 10, slouched in a sofa chair, immerses herself in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, an enthralled and devious grin spreading across her face. In another, a doll girl of around five sits across from her stuffed puppy, pointing a finger at him in stern admonishment. She’s wearing socks, her legs are spread, and you can make out the trim of her underwear from beneath her dress.

Bartlett’s dolls, despite their anatomical exactitude, don’t necessarily try to pass as real. In the photographs, however, the line between animate and inanimate becomes seriously blurred. The artist, with the expertise he acquired as a commercial photographer, crafts scenarios that look alternately real and fake from one blink to the next. Bartlett’s images display the camera’s ability to freeze true life and life-like moments with the same sense of veracity. It’s in these photographs, which capture neither quite intimate memory nor repressed fantasy, that the viewer loses grip on what’s real.

There are many ways to process Bartlett’s work, none of them quite satisfying. Many read Bartlett’s art as a way to create the family he never had, his 15 life-size dolls becoming surrogates for his lost childhood and unrealized kids of his own. “Bartlett has been viewed as a lost child who grew into a gentle Gepetto,” Roberta Smith said in 2007. Gepetto would be the most generous literary comparison to Bartlett; others have suggested Pygmalion’s Henry Higgins or Lolita‘s Humbert Humbert. The combination of playful eroticism and pure innocence in the works does derail from the usual family portrait. As Ken Johnson wrote in the Boston Globe: “Looking at these dolls is like seeing through the eyes of a pedophile.”

In 1932, still years before Bartlett made his first doll, he composed a short autobiography for Harvard’s 25th anniversary report. It read: “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.” Aside from being quite the ominous alumni update, the brief glimpse into Bartlett’s thought process hints at the repressed compulsions at the core of his work, whatever those may be.

As any good Freudian knows, what is familiar in the past and repressed in the present often returns to disrupt us in the future. This is the story of all that’s uncanny, all that infects our safe spaces with a whiff of something old, loved, turned sour. My favorite theory about Bartlett’s dolls is that they are manifestations of his own inner child, perhaps a little girl, innocent and precocious, who never got to express herself any other way.

When he died in 1992, Bartlett instructed that his estate, worth $300,000, be “divided between orphan charities.” Of course, he really left much more: a trove of hypnotic photographs, 15 masterful sculptures, and the mystery of a seemingly harmless man with a very unusual passion that is equal parts inspiring and unnerving.

Meet Morton Bartlett, The Harvard Man Who Secretly Made Life-Size Dolls. By Priscilla Frank.  Huffington Post , 1/04/2015 Updated Nov 11, 2015

Photographs by Morton Bartlett of his sculpted “fantasy family” children with hand-made clothes and wigs, on view with Marion Harris, New York.

It’s strange that dolls inspire such horror in so many people. They are, after all, designed for the enjoyment and pleasure of young children—the vulnerable and innocent among us who, presumably, we do not desire to terrify in a systematic way. But the fact remains that, despite the best intentions, dolls are, for many people, the stuff that nightmares are made of.

I’ve come up against this more times than I can count since I decided to organize the installation Playthings: The Uncanny Art of Morton Bartlett, on view at LACMA through January 31, 2015. The show consists of 12 large color prints of lifelike dolls produced by Bartlett in the mid-1950s, as well as material pulled from his personal archive. Over a period of roughly 25 years beginning sometime in the mid-1930s, he meticulously constructed and painted 15 child dolls—complete with clothing that he sewed by hand—which he then photographed in his home studio. They are fantastic creations, but despite that, the most frequent comments I get in casual conversation go something like this: “How creepy they are!” “What on earth are they?!” Not that I blame anyone for feeling that way.

Bartlett was not an “artist” in the conventional sense. He worked a variety of odd jobs before settling on freelance photography as a profession. Creating and photographing his dolls was only a “hobby,” as he called it in a rare statement about his creations. He was what has come to be called, somewhat controversially, an “outsider artist”—someone who produces work outside an established and recognized market and audience for art. Despite the prodigious numbers of photographs that he produced, he kept his dolls hidden from even his most intimate friends, and it seems he never spoke of them again after he locked them up in a cabinet in his Boston brownstone in 1963. It was only once his work was discovered by the antiques dealer Marion Harris soon after Bartlett died in 1992 and, more recently, through the enterprising collecting of Barry Sloane, who produced the beautiful color prints from Kodachrome slides now in LACMA’s collection, that Bartlett’s work started circulating within the mainstream art market.

The patchy details of his life—born in Chicago, orphaned at eight years old, adopted by a wealthy Massachusetts family, student at Phillips Exeter Academy and then Harvard University—are often recited as a way of providing some kind of biographical detail to hold on to. In truth, however, very little is known about the man, nor of his motives for creating these dolls. Despite the incompleteness of his biography, it has been the primary way in which the work has been understood, most notably, Harris’s claim that the dolls were an attempt to reconstitute the family that he lost as a child.

Bartlett was by no means alone in finding creative inspiration in his chosen subject. Images of dolls constitute a sort of micro-genre in the history of photography, from the earliest years of the medium. Dolls and mannequins were of particular interest to Dada and Surrealist artists of the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s. Perhaps most famously, Hans Bellmer created dolls with moveable appendages, which he photographed propped against walls, sprawled out on his bed, and fully separated into their constituent parts. For Bellmer and the Surrealists who championed him, his figures were the ideal Surrealist objects—symbols of naivety, femininity, sexual fantasy, and political victimization. The historical concurrence of the creation of Bellmer’s dolls—the first one was created in 1933—and Bartlett’s is tantalizing.

Bellmer’s work inspired a number of artists of the 1970s and 1980s who used dolls to comment on identity and the social politics of the body. Cindy Sherman’s photographs of mutilated dolls are perhaps the most clearly referential of the earlier artists work. Less violent in appearance, but clearly interested in the kinds of surreal and disturbing effects of dolls, can be found in the work of Laurie Simmons, who has used dolls in a variety of projects since the 1970s. Bernard Faucon’s Summer Camp, among other series, used dolls and mannequins tinged with Bellmer’s subversive sexual undertones. He presented them in ways that share much with Bartlett’s color-saturated, theatrical world of artificial children engaged in unsettling forms of play.

One commercial artist and author who overlapped chronologically with Bartlett was Dare Wright, whose book series Lonely Girl featured photographs by her of the eponymous doll, starting in the late 1950s. Bartlett’s images share perhaps most with Wright’s, in terms of sentiment and fascination with the naïve emotional lives of children. She also shares a Geppetto-like quality with Bartlett, expressing that basic human fascination with breathing life into dolls—one of her books is titled Make Me Real.

It is exactly this possibility—fantastical as it may be—of an inanimate surrogate transforming into animate flesh that often inspires the fear of dolls. Dolls are designed as versions of humans, and it tends to be true that the more human they become, the more terrifying they tend to be. Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay "The Uncanny," a foundational text on the psychology of the uncanny, roots it in the confusion between human and automaton, citing E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1816), which focuses on a lifelike doll. Uncanniness is the disturbing sensation of encountering something simultaneously familiar and foreign, resulting in the paradoxical response of fascination and repulsion. The feeling has more recently entered popular parlance in studies of the “uncanny valley” produced by robots and computer-generated graphics that are nearly-but-not-quite-human.

Popular culture—particularly horror and science-fiction film—has certainly played its part in contributing to the anxiety around dolls. The current LACMA exhibition Haunted Screens: German Cinema in the 1920s features elements of one of the earliest such films—Metropolis—complete with a replica of the robot who comes to life in the film. In more recent decades, schlocky horror has played on the public’s fear of nefarious dolls coming to life—in movies with colorful titles, such as Child’s Play, Dolls, Demonic Toys, and Dolly Dearest, as well as the more recent blockbuster, Annabelle. So when a news story recently broke about mysterious dolls appearing on porches in San Clemente, reputedly resembling the young girls who resided within, we might be excused for thinking the worst.

The fact that Bartlett made such a focused attempt to create lifelike child mannequins—the dolls are all fully anatomically correct—only adds to the unnerving qualities of the photographs. If he was a latter-day Pygmalion, attempting to animate his sculptures—to what end was he working this magic? Like Henry Darger, the graphic artist who had a similar decades-long obsession with representations of young children, Bartlett has fallen victim to posthumous chargers of questionable sexual intentions.

Bartlett’s motives for creating and photographing his dolls might never be known in all of their complexity, but it is clear that he had a keen interest in the interior lives and psychology of children. His photographs seek to accomplish that long-sought dream of animating the inanimate. He breathes life into the dolls with his camera, imbuing each with vitality and their own personality. It is this conjuring that lends them their uncanny—or, to put it more bluntly, creepy—quality. Had he not been so interested in creating convincing approximations of real children, rendered with such care and fidelity, they might not inspire such unease. But what would be the fun in that?

Hello, Dollies! By Ryan Linkof, Unframed , November 12, 2014

                                                             

On his death in 1992, at the age of 89, Morton Bartlett, a complete recluse, instructed that his estate, worth $300,000, be 'divided between orphan charities'. He made no mention of the contents of a number of handmade wooden boxes his executors found in the basement of his Boston town house, which are now worth considerably more than that sum. The boxes, it turned out, had been acting as tiny coffins for twelve girls and three boys, ranging from infancy to puberty, made of painted plaster. They'd been lying there undisturbed since 1965.

Bartlett's dolls are half life-size and anatomically accurate. The detailing is astonishing. Each figure has finger- and toenails, nipples and a navel. Those with open mouths reveal two sets of teeth and a three-dimensional tongue. One of the boys has sunburnt cheeks and tan lines beneath his shorts. Only the girls have genitals. Though the dolls share a certain family likeness, which may resemble Bartlett's own appearance as a child, each is a recognizable individual, with a distinctive haircut, facial expression and body pose - one girl licks her lips flirtatiously, another bawls plastic tears. Bartlett laboured over these figures and their accessories for around 30 years, with each doll taking some ten months to complete. He pored over anatomy books, and knitted and embroidered the clothing himself. The wigs came from shops, but he customized them to suit each doll. Alongside the full figures were a number of individual body parts: heads, arms and torsos. Joints allowed Bartlett to remove heads, arms and feet so that he could dress the dolls without risking damage to the fragile plaster. It also meant that the body parts were interchangeable, somewhat like Hans Bellmer's La Poupée.

Had Mike Kelley known of them when he curated 'The Uncanny' for Sonsbeek '93, I doubt he would have passed them up. Kelley's 'harem', as he called it, brought together mannequins, waxworks, automatons, medical dolls, sex dolls, movie stand-ins, religious and ancient statuary, along with recent sculpture and photography that evoked these various sources, by Bruce Nauman, Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Kiki Smith, Charles Ray, Laurie Simmons and others. Kelley applied Freud's The Uncanny (1919) and Ernst Jentsch's On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906) to the question of why the attributes of these various figurative objects have been repressed so long in discourses about Western sculpture. The attributes he identifies are naturalistic colour, movement, flesh-like material such as wax, and ready-made elements such as clothing. It is these elements that provoke in the viewer 'doubt as to whether or not a lifeless object may in fact be animate' (Jentsch). Developing this idea, and combining it with Freud's concept of the fetish, Kelley concludes that an uncanny object is a substitute for something once feared or desired that has undergone repression, such as the Oedipal drama or the pagan practice of human sacrifice.

Kelley called his essay 'Playing with Dead Things'. The only article on Morton Bartlett's dolls to be published in his own lifetime appeared in Yankee magazine in 1962, under the mawkish title 'The Sweethearts of Mr Bartlett'. His plaster girls and boys, born of conflicting impulses, occupy both these positions. Bartlett was orphaned at the age of eight and never had children himself. It seems the dolls were substitutes for the family he never had. This reading is credible up to a point, but it doesn't account for the dolls' undeniably erotic undertones. The sexual signs that intrude on Bartlett's otherwise saccharine private universe imply that the dolls played the role of fetishes or substitutes for forbidden desires. Bartlett came close to admitting as much in his entry in the 1957 Harvard University Yearbook (he was an alumnus): '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.'

Around 200 black and white photographs of the dolls were found among the complete figures, the body parts and the neatly folded clothes in those wooden boxes. Some show the dolls posing as if for a fashion plate; the more elaborate images show them engaged in completely believable childish activities in fastidiously contrived environments. In one, a girl with brunette curls in a nightie sits up in bed reading to her younger brother, who has fallen asleep beside her. In another, a girl in a straw hat, sitting on a stool, hand on hip, scolds her teddy bear and toy dog. In an image that could almost be a Sherman or a Simmons a girl in the first throes of puberty, wearing an old-fashioned swimming costume, hovers in front of a beach scene bristling with deckchairs and parasols. The background must have been made by projecting a photographic transparency behind the dolls. Bartlett's skills in set-dressing and lighting were acquired from his years spent working as an advertising photographer. His technical sophistication as a photographer and model-maker mark him out as a striking anomaly in the field of outsider art.

The spare body parts suggest that Bartlett thought of the dolls as vehicles for the photographs, rather than as ends in themselves, much as a prop has no life beyond the film it was made for. In these images the body of the child is substituted twice over, first by the painted plaster, then by the photograph. The dolls' artifice is obscured by the images' lack of colour, their flatness and their small size. Plaster returns to flesh in Bartlett's photographs, which anticipate Hiroshi Sugimoto's black and white prints of waxworks in Madame Tussaud's. The indexical nature of photography further conspires to re-animate these little effigies. 'Photography has something to do with resurrection', wrote Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida (1980). In Bartlett's photographs dead things take on the semblance of life.

Guys and Dolls : Morton Bartlett. By Alex Farquharson. Frieze, March 3, 2003.

Also of interest  :

Divulging the Erotic Secrets of Self-Taught Artists.  By Claire Voon. Hyperallergic , May 15, 2017 

An exhibition at the Museum of Sex is the first to bring together sexually charged works by outsider artists.

 Fear of discrimination is one of the lamentable reasons why some of these artworks may have been made in the first place — to release suppressed longings. But our open access now to such raw expressions of desire can also be jarring or even disturbing. One of the best-known outsider artists represented here is Morton Bartlett, who sculpted meticulous plaster dolls of children and photographed them as if they were alive, in special outfits. A number of his black-and-white images from 1950 cover one wall, accompanied by a single polychrome figure of a girl wearing a night coat. Some speculate that art making was a way for Bartlett to work through his own childhood experiences, as an orphan since age eight; others claim that his works, which show young girls’ bare skin and even, at times, their underwear, represent a sexual deviance.