‘The Gibrans swear Bartlett was no pedophile. When their building was sold in 1964 and they had to leave, Bartlett and the Gibrans found new homes near each other in the South End, and they remained close until Bartlett’s death. When the Gibrans married in 1957, Bartlett was their best man. ‘For almost 10 years, from about 1955 to 1964, the Gibrans and Bartlett lived in the same apartment building at 15 Fayette St., where Bartlett produced most of his dolls. (Kahlil, a well-known sculptor, was a cousin of Kahlil Gibran who wrote the famous book of poetry “The Prophet.”) Moreover, they say he was not a naive outsider artist. ‘What of the darker questions about Bartlett? His longtime close friends Jean and Kahlil Gibran of Boston insist that he was neither an antisocial eccentric nor a psychosexual deviant. You are there: JULIE SAUL GALLERY – Morton Bartlett Playthings: The Uncanny Art of Morton Bartlett SINGULARITÉS : ABSENCES D’OEUVRE : HENRY DARGER, MORTON BARTLETT Review of “Playthings: The Uncanny Art of Morton Bartlett” Meet Morton Bartlett, The Harvard Man Who Secretly Made Life-Size Dollsīook: ‘Family found: The lifetime obsession of self-taught artist, Morton Bartlett’ The Mysterious Life and Work of Morton Bartlett and His ‘Family’ of Dollsīook: ‘Morton Bartlett: Secret Universe III’
What we do know is that he created some beautiful, mysterious, and unnerving works of art - objects and images that continue to tease and beguile with Sphinx-like allure.’ - Ken Johnson, Boston Marion Harris Gallery ‘Unless there comes to light some new material such as letters, a diary, or an abandoned novel, we’ll probably never know what Bartlett himself thought he was doing or what his deepest desires were.
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Its purpose is that of all proper hobbies - to let out urges that do not find expression in other channels.” He didn’t specify exactly what urges he had in mind, but one naturally wonders, was he managing forbidden desires by sublimating them into his art? Was he a real-life version of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, creating his own artificial Lolitas? Or was he externalizing a part of his own psyche - opening himself up to and setting free his own inner, feminine child?
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‘In a brief autobiography Bartlett wrote for Harvard’s class of 1932 25th anniversary report - quoted in full in Harris’s book - Bartlett mentioned, “My hobby is sculpting in plaster. This is a big part of their appeal - that they can seem so obviously unreal and yet so captivatingly alive at the same time. Yet the dolls are not feats of what would later be called “super realism.” They still have the artificial, toylike look of dolls and mannequins. He used medical growth charts and anatomy books to ensure that his figures were correct in every detail. Bartlett invested a great deal of effort into making his dolls realistic. ‘Whatever Bartlett’s real motivations may have been, what we have is the work he left behind. The common perception, based on Bartlett’s work and sketchy information about his life, has been that he was a deeply eccentric, reclusive, lifelong bachelor who, working in near-total secrecy, sublimated his irregular desires into figurative substitutes for the love objects that he lacked in real life.
In some of the pictures, the female dolls appeared nude, revealing all their anatomically accurate parts. ‘There were expertly tailored clothes for the dolls and hundreds of professional-quality photographs of the dolls in evocatively staged and dramatically lighted situations. The material had been removed from a townhouse in Boston’s South End after the death of its elderly owner, a man named Morton Bartlett, a Harvard University dropout and Boston-based commercial photographer and graphic designer. ‘In 1993, Marion Harris, a New York art and antiques dealer, made the discovery of her life: In a booth at the Pier Show, a major antiques fair in New York, she came upon a collection of dolls and doll parts in boxes, along with stacks of old photographs.
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