Morton Bartlett

Girl in Yellow Sundress

Courtesy Julie Saul Gallery

You’ve probably never heard of Morton Bartlett (1903–1992)—a self-taught artist from Boston who made anatomically precise, half-scale dolls of (mostly female) pre- and pubescent children that he clothed and photographed—but once you’ve seen his work, you won’t forget him. Few parallels in art exist, other than the fantastical drawings of Henry Darger, whose Vivian Girls conveys a similar penchant for eroticized innocence. Bartlett’s photographs, though, forgo the metanarrative of violence and war that Darger created, functioning instead as portraits.

Bartlett made approximately 15 dolls in his life, each sculpted from cast plaster and dressed in outfits he sewed and knit himself. The distinct facial expressions and poses he gave them ranged from childlike wonder and sullen contemplation to fearful trepidation and come-hither playfulness. Only three of these sculptures are male, all of a seemingly identical boy of about eight, allegedly modeled after Bartlett at the precipitous moment in his life when he was orphaned (though he was later adopted). Darger was also parentless and, like Bartlett, lived a reclusive life.

In “The Sweethearts of Mr. Bartlett,” Julie Saul presents 30 works, including color images made from Bartlett’s original Kodachrome slides circa 1955, three doll sculptures, drawings and several black-and-white photos, among which are a self-portrait and one “nude” of a girl doll. Ancillary as it may seem, the latter is the adrenaline shot of the show, exposing all the prurient curiosity of Bartlett’s seemingly innocent project. Its representation of the female body at the brink of physical maturity suddenly reminds us that these dolls were made to be dressed and undressed: an eerie proposition, indeed.