Morton Bartlett was born in Chicago in 1909. He was orphaned at the age of 8 and adopted by the Bartletts. He studied at Harvard University for two years (1928-1930) before dropping out, probably due to f inancial
diff iculties. Following military service in World War II, he began working as a free-lance commercial photographer and graphic editor. Bartlett, who never married or started a family, lived in Boston.
- The discovery -
In 1993, art and antiques dealer Marion Harris came across Bartlett's
photographic and sculptural works in an antique fair in New York. She
purchased the whole lot: 15 dolls and some 200 staged photographs. A year later she published a catalogue of his work, and in 1995 presented his work at the Outsider Art Fair in New York. Bartlett's art has since been featured in galleries and museum the world over.

- The work -
Bartlett's oeuvre spans doll sculptures and photographs. He began sculpting the f irst dolls in 1936, relying on anatomy books and medical growth tables. Until 1963 he created scores of dolls, of which only twelve dolls of young and adolescent girls and three of young boys (reminiscent of the artist as a child) survived. The dolls' limbs are removable, so that they may be arranged in different positions. Bartlett clothed his imaginary
family members with self-designed, self-sewn and self-knitted clothes, and photographed them in mundane postures blended with disconcerting eroticism.
The last doll was created in 1963, before he was forced to evacuate the
house in which he had lived for nearly 50 years. Stories have it that he
packed the dolls in wooden crates and stopped sculpting. Famous af icionados of his work include contemporary artists such as Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and the Chapman Brothers.