Pacific Ocean, 1984  Jennifer Bartlett (American, born 1941)
Pacific Ocean, 1984  Oil on canvas 105 in. x 360 in. (266.7 cm x
914.4 cm)  Crocker Art Museum, gift of AT&T, Inc.      • When
Jennifer Bartlett left school and began to forge her own path,
Minimalism was the leading art movement. At the outset, she
painted mostly on one-foot-square panels of cut steel arranged
into a large grid. Methodical rather than intuitive, the results
were consistent with that of many contemporary painters and
sculptors who confronted Minimalism in the late 1960s.     A
graduate of Mills College, today Jennifer Bartlett is
internationally recognized for a variety of approaches. During
the 1970s, she moved toward a more illusionistic manner, but one
in which abstraction still dominated. Among her themes was the
recurrence of personal symbols such as the house, mountain,
ocean, or tree. In the 1980s, her iconography shifted again,
this time to the depiction of Realist scenes based on
photographic imagery. Pacific Ocean, in par