Art: A PAFA survey of all the major phases of Jennifer Bartlett's career

Two years out of Yale University's art school, Jennifer Bartlett moved to New York City and began to think deeply "about what I could do that wasn't copying somebody else."

Nine years later, the consequences of that intense contemplating emerged spectacularly at Paula Cooper Gallery as a monumental painting titled Rhapsody, now owned by the Museum of Modern Art.

The painting announced a breakthrough not only in its broad intellectual reach and its mix of abstraction and representation but also in its systematic gridded structure and particularly in its medium.

Covering more than 150 running feet of wall space, Rhapsody is painted in bright enamel colors on 987 steel plates, each a foot square and organized in 147 vertical rows. Composing a painting this way, as an expandable, geometric mosaic, was Bartlett's ingenious solution to not copying somebody else.

Over the years, the steel-plate format has become the 72-year-old artist's primary claim to fame, although, as we see in a survey of her career at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she has continued to innovate over more than four decades.

Rhapsody made Bartlett famous, commercially successful, and a role model for younger artists, particularly women. She has been a regular presence in Philadelphia since 1994 through exhibitions at Locks Gallery. Her most recent show there closed last weekend, just as the Academy show opened.

This first museum survey for Bartlett since 1985 was organized by the Parrish Art Museum on eastern Long Island, where it will be seen next year. At 26 works it's not large, but most of the paintings are, so the show comfortably fills the largest gallery in PAFA's Hamilton building.

Except for the so-called blob paintings of 2012-13, which were in the Locks show, it includes all the major phases of the artist's career. The stand-in for Rhapsody is Atlantic Ocean, a seascape on 224 steel plates that wraps around a corner.

Right from the beginning, Bartlett's art has been confounding. She typically sets up organizing systems - grids being the most prominent and the most persistent over the years - and then disrupts them.

She's not a narrator but an interpreter of perception. She manipulates the visual and psychological tension of slightly different views of a subject - the parallax of constantly shifting equilibrium.

As the exhibition demonstrates, she also alternates between representation and abstraction, sometimes combining the two in larger works such as Twins. Her themes are often personal, which means they can be enigmatic, like the images in the Hours series.

At the same time, her core themes and motifs are universal - the house, the ocean, passage of time, language. And superimposed on all of these is the rigorous architecture of the grid - more painterly than precise in later paintings such as Amagansett Diptych #1 and Grasses.

(Constructing a painting as a grid isn't a Bartlett innovation; Alfred Jensen, 1903-81, got there before she did.)

Bartlett's fascination with dislocated views, the basis of the two paintings just mentioned, emerges clearly in paintings from the early 1980s such as Pool (three views of an empty swimming pool), Wind (five views of a pool with a screen of trees behind), and Atlantic Ocean, a triptych of mostly waves that appears seamless until one notices the discontinuous horizon.

The pool paintings are melancholy in their evocation of romantic desuetude, but calibrated shifts in perspective make Atlantic Ocean dynamic, even heroic.

An especially appealing innovation, image doubling, emerged in 1987 with the works called Boats and Double House. In each case, Bartlett repeated a painted image - two small boats; two small, white, peaked-roof sheds - by placing a sculptural version on the floor in front of the canvas.

Projecting a painted illusion into real space as a three-dimensional structure enhances the iconic resonance of these familiar objects, particularly the house, one of the more emotionally fraught symbols in human culture.

This powerful chemistry surprised me years ago when the pieces were new, and I was pleased to discover that the effect hasn't diminished over time.

During the 2000s Bartlett's work continued to evolve both abstractly and representationally. With the former, she became engaged with texts, their words formed of dots painted into a grid.

One of these, Twins, is a dialogue with her late friend, painter Elizabeth Murray. I find extended text paintings such as Twins and Purple Corridor tedious; for the experience of a text, I prefer to read a book.

The painterly grids such as Grasses, Amagansett Diptych #1, and Rose are far more satisfying. Constructed as layers of wavy, reticulated patterns, they're lushly visual. They can be absorbed as sensuous totalities, whereas the texts need to be laboriously parsed, word by pointillist word.

But then, Bartlett has also written a novel, History of the Universe - also the title of this exhibition. It suggests the magnitude of her ambition as an artist, to communicate the essence of everything. Even Michelangelo wasn't able to achieve that.

"Jennifer Bartlett: History of the Universe" continues at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 128 N. Broad St., through Oct. 13. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and 11 to 5 Sundays. Admission: $15 general, $12 visitors 60 and older and students with ID, $8 for visitors 13 to 18. Information: 215-972-7600 or www.pafa.org.

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"Art" by Edward J. Sozanski and "Galleries" by Edith Newhall appear on alternating Sundays.