Works by Morton Bartlett

Works by Morton Bartlett at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica, CA. "...n 1993 Marion Harris, a New York art and antiques dealer made the discovery of her life in a booth at the Pier Show. She came upon a collection of dolls and doll parts in boxes, along with stacks of old photographs. 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 (1909–1992). Acting on pure instinct, she bought everything and when she got it all home she discovered that what she had purchased was a group of 15 exquisitely realistic, half life-size dolls carefully wrapped in old newspapers and stored in custom made wooden boxes. Three of them represented a boy of about eight years old, and the rest were sculptures of girls between the ages of eight and sixteen. A self-taught artist, Bartlett created his fifteen extraordinary lifelike dolls between 1936 and 1963. It took him over a year to finish each sculpture, working from anatomical and costume books. He clothed his precious sculptures in fashions that he expertly stitched and knitted himself, and then photographed them. Bartlett did not use photography simply to document his works. He used the camera to enhance their true to life nature and to suggest narrative situations. Some writers have theorized that Bartlett was more interested in the photographs than the sculptures–that the sculptures were props in the creation of cinematic characters."