About 20 people attended the opening of Jennifer Bartlett: In and Out of the Garden at the Phillips Collection on the evening of Feb. 9 for remarks given by Dr. Jonathan P. Binstock, the museum’s director and CEO, and Chief Curator Emeritus Dr. Klaus Ottman. Works in multiple media from American artist Jennifer Bartlett’s In the Garden series were on display. The late artist’s sister and studio manager were also in attendance.

Bartlett first achieved critical and commercial success in the 1970s with her work Rhapsody, which consists of 987 one-foot-square steel panels—such panels would become a signature of her body of work. “She was one of the most innovative, experimental, and fearless artists that I’ve ever encountered,” Ottman tells City Paper. He knew Bartlett from the 1990s until her death in 2022 and previously curated another exhibit of her work at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Parrish Art Museum, Jennifer Bartlett: History of the Universe. Works 1970–2011. “Despite the fact she had enormous critical and financial success with Rhapsody … she didn’t stay with that. She kept experimenting and changing her style and moving into other media.” Bartlett’s creative integrity and fearlessness were themes Ottman returned to in his opening remarks.

In the Garden was Bartlett’s first major series following Rhapsody. The artist spent the winter of 1979-1980 in Nice, France, after swapping houses with her friend, British novelist Piers Paul.  The run-down garden with a leaky pool became the focal point of a series of 200 drawings, In the Garden, which would later inspire “psychologically charged re-imaginings of the garden” in paintings, according to press materials. The Phillips Collection’s exhibit of Bartlett’s work—including drawings, a watercolor on paper, and paintings on various media, among them the iconic steel panels—fills one room, with two of the walls occupied by a single work each. The larger of these, the five-panel “Wind” (1983), is the highlight of the exhibition. In the foreground, from various perspectives, is the garden’s pool and fountain. In the background, from a more stable set of perspectives, are the poplar trees, blown in the wind. Read left to right, the painting gives the sense of moving in space in the foreground while simultaneously moving through time in the background. 

The Bartlett exhibit was originally intended as part of a larger 2020 project that was delayed by COVID-19: Jennifer Bartlett & Pierre Bonnard: In and Out of the Garden. A bound catalog for the canceled show is available on a bench within the reimagined solo exhibition. The other part of the originally intended joint exhibition will open on March 2 as Bonnard’s Worlds in rooms just off In and Out of the Garden. For now, the Bartlett exhibit, for all its power, does feel brief and incomplete; hopefully the addition of Pierre Bonnard’s works will amend this.

This pairing of two technically disparate artists engages with the same theme that speaks to the heart of the Phillips’ mission to “bring together congenial spirits among artists from different parts of the world and from different periods of time,” as founder Duncan Phillips said almost 100 years ago. The conversation between Bartlett and Bonnard will continue with the opening of Sydney Vernon: Interior Lives on March 6 at the gallery’s southeast location Phillips@THEARC. Also in the press material, Sydney Vernon, whose work engages with the experiences of Black American women, credits her encounter with Bonnard’s work as enriching her own painterly depiction of “things that appear as banal, such as how light shines through a window.”

Listening and conversation were core themes that Ottman wanted visitors to take away from Jennifer Bartlett: In and Out of the Garden. Asked about how a series that took radically different approaches to a single subject could speak to our nation’s polarized epoch, Ottman says, “One thing that I like about art in general is that artists see differently from other people. They see things most people don’t see … even if you have a very realistic painter painting a scene, [if] you were to stand in front of the same landscape, you [would] discover things you’d never seen before. [Bartlett] takes this another step further: basically every day, she would use the same motifs, the same view and paint it again and paint it slightly differently … so that there really is no one, single view of the world.”

Jennifer Bartlett: In and Out of the Garden is on view through April 30 at the Phillips Collection. phillipscollection.org. $10–$20.