Exhibitions

Born in 1909 in Chicago.
Died in 1992. He mainly lived in Boston.

Orphaned at the age of 8, Morton Bartlett was adopted by a family from Massachusetts. He attended the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy and then went on to Harvard University to continue his studies, which he interrupted two years later to move on to various different  professions. With no artistic training, he launched himself into sculpture and photography in 1936. He made mainly plaster dolls for whom he designed a veritable wardrobe. Most of his figurines are females aged from 6 to 16. He subsequently went on to design various scenarios drawn from everyday life which he photographed in order to form a “family” album. To give these children’s bodies accurate and detailed anatomical features, he took his inspiration from pictures contained in several books. This tendency to seek for perfection meant that he needed about a year to create each of his dolls. It was only after Morton Bartlett’s death that his work, consisting of about 10 figurines, some 200 photographs and around 10 polychrome slides, was discovered by the collector Marion Harris.

Morton Bartlett’s work is kept in the American Folk Art Museum in New York, and in the Collection de l’Art brut in Lausanne.