| Catherine Yu-Shan Hsieh on Morton Bartlett
Wrapped in newspapers from 1963, 15 plaster figures of boys and girls |
|
Catherine Yu-Shan Hsieh on Morton Bartlett
Wrapped in newspapers from 1963, 15 plaster figures of boys and girls had been waiting quietly in Morton Bartlett’s house for nearly three decades. Art dealer Marion Harris discovered them, and black-and-white photographs of them, in 1993, a year after Bartlett’s death at 83.
Critics have suspected Bartlett was a pedophile, though there was no evidence to suggest he had ever committed crimes against children. Pedophilic or not, Bartlett demonstrated an amazing craft in sculpture and photography. A sense of obsession lies secretly between the open legs of a seated boy in a red sweater, between the thighs of a girl in a yellow sunsuit, and beneath the flowery dress of a girl, who lifts up just a corner.
Orphaned at the age of seven and never married, Bartlett spent his whole life in solitude. The children he sculpted, which appear to be aged primarily six through sixteen, were the constructed family he never had. “My hobby is sculpting in plaster,” he wrote in the 25th anniversary report of his Harvard class, commenting on his motivations. “Its purpose is that of all proper hobbies—to let out urges that do not find expression in other channels.”
Whatever they might have been, these urges contributed to Bartlett’s role as an outsider artist. He never received a formal art education, and after the attention brought by a two-page spread in Yankee Magazine in April 1962, he packed away his sculptures and never showed them again.
The exquisite details of Bartlett’s less-than-half-size children become astonishing when these little figures are stripped of their clothes. Dolls they might be, their sexual characteristics are presented quite realistically. In the almost 200 photographs that Bartlett took of the sculptures, however, the kids were usually fully clothed. Though these images seem to have been kept as a private pleasure, Bartlett refrained from making a kinky desire become a reality, even in his own studio.
Of the 15 figures remaining only three are boys, each of which possesses a resemblance to the others. They are allegedly crafted after Bartlett’s own image, and appear to be the age Bartlett was when he lost his parents. In one photograph, a boy in a red sweater and a knit cap sits on a life-size chair, staring into the camera, laughing wildly. The frantic laugh, however, can’t conceal his diminutiveness, his lonesomeness in the giant chair. One chubby girl in a light yellow dress is posed as if she had just been slapped in the face. Another girl is dressed in a grey shirt and white skirt—a plain outfit under which hides a pair of shiny turquoise panties.
A portrait of a young Morton Bartlett shows him dressed in a white shirt, skinny and clean-shaven. Above his thin lips were a pointed nose and a set of melancholy eyes. He stares into the ether with a pensive look, but a voluptuous girl is next to him, smiling. She wears a beach hat, a red shirt, and a pair of shorts only just long enough to cover her buttocks. Did such an image comfort Bartlett? Was he happy in the company of his fantasy family? The questions remain unanswered. But Bartlett’s loneliness and yearning for love never left him: they are still here, living and breathing in these little sweethearts of his.
