[Painted Plaster Figure of Seated Boy]

Morton Bartlett

ca. 1950 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

Between 1935 and 1965 Morton Bartlett, a self-taught artist who owned an art supply store and produced catalogues for the Scharff toy company, fashioned a group of eerily lifelike painted plaster sculptures of children in the basement of his Boston townhouse. Over the years, he photographed these figures in a variety of poses, dressed in garments he had designed and sewn himself, creating a secret archive of images that speak of love and loss, loneliness and obsession, with naïve eloquence and sublimated pathos. The photographs, which were discovered along with the sculptures shortly after Bartlett's death in 1992, are provocative and psychologically complex; like film stills from a private movie, they captivate the eye and tease the imagination.

Artist

Morton Bartlett

Date

ca. 1950

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gift, 2000