Will Barnet retrospective, 1931-1987: Harmon-Meek Gallery, Naples, Florida, March 11-23, 1990 : Midwest Museum of American Art, Elkhart, Indiana, ... 1990 (American Artist retrospective series)
Will Barnet was an American printmaker and painter known for elegantly stylized portraits and classically composed visions of beautiful women and children.
Background
Will Barnet was born on May 25, 1911, in Beverly, Massachusetts, United States, into the family of Noah and Sarah (Toahnich) Barnet. His father, who had immigrated from Russia, was a machinist in a shoe factory. His mother came from Eastern Europe. Mr. Barnet became interested in art as a child and by age 12 had his own studio in his parents’ basement.
Education
Mr. Barnet attended Boston Museum Fine Arts School in 1927 - 1930 and, on a scholarship, went to New York to study at the Art Students League, arriving from 1930 to 1933, he once said, with $10 and a portfolio of seascapes and portraits of the family cat.
Will Barnet worked briefly under Stuart Davis and became acquainted with the Surrealist artist Arshile Gorky. Mr. Barnet started out as a Social Realist printmaker responding to the struggles of ordinary people during the Depression. He was “radicalized” at 19, he said, roaming the city and sketching the faces of the downtrodden while renting a room for $1 a night.
Four years after joining the Art Students League he was appointed its official printer. He went on to work in graphic arts for the Depression-era Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. He also made prints for the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco and the painter and political cartoonist William Gropper.
Mr. Barnet had his first solo exhibition at the Eighth Street Playhouse in Manhattan in 1935 and, three years later, his first gallery show at the Hudson Walker Gallery, also in Manhattan. That same year he married Mary Sinclair, a painter and fellow student, with whom he had three sons. In 1939 his work was included in “American Art Today” at the New York World’s Fair.
Eventually his interest in Modernist formal innovations led to colorful, Picassoesque paintings depicting domestic family scenes, often featuring young children, and by the end of the 1940s his paintings had become entirely abstract. He soon fell in with a group known as the Indian Space Painters, who created geometrically complex abstract paintings using forms derived from both Native American art and modern European painting.
But Mr. Barnet returned to traditionalist representational painting in the early 1960s. Under the influences of early Renaissance painting, Japanese printmaking and, perhaps obliquely, Pop Art, he made flattened, precisely contoured portraits of the architect Frederick Kiesler, the art critic Katherine Kuh, and the art collector Roy Neuberger.
By then he was divorced and had married Elena Ciurlys in 1953. They had a daughter, Ona, and both she and her mother were subjects of his portraits as well. His later images of mysterious waiting women showed the influences of Pre-Raphaelite narratives, Magritte’s Surrealism, and Edward Hopper’s taciturn romanticism.
In 2003 Mr. Barnet again changed course, returning to abstraction and resuming the engagement with bold shapes, vivid color, and dynamic compositions that characterized his painting in the 1950s. He continued to work into his 90s, and in 2010 he was honored with an exhibition, “Will Barnet and the Art Students League”, at the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery in Manhattan. He began teaching graphic arts and composition for the league in 1936, became an instructor of painting and continued to teach at the school until 1980.
In addition to the Art Students League, Mr. Barnet taught at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art from 1945 to 1978 and, in shorter stints, at Yale, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and other schools. He was awarded a National Medal of Arts from 2011, which was presented by President Obama in a White House ceremony that year.
It was in 2011 when the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey exhibited a selection of his canvases in honor of his centennial year. His work was also shown in many solo and group shows around the United States, including six appearances in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s annual exhibitions. He was the subject of several museum retrospectives. “Will Barnet at 100”, presented at the National Academy Museum in 2011, was the last. It was also his first solo retrospective in New York. A longtime resident of the National Arts Club, Barnet died in New York City on November 13, 2012, at the age of 101.
In the prints and paintings that Will produced from the mid-1960s on, Mr. Barnet ranged between a simplified form of realism and a poetic, visionary symbolism. A skilled draftsman, he created exactingly linear, subtly colored portraits of family members and friends. Like many American painters of his generation he was digesting the evolving trends in Europe and integrating the new visual vocabulary into his American style while remaining universal, referencing his own personal history with images of his wife, his daughter, and their family pets.
Quotations:
“Painting is almost like a religious experience, which should go on and on. Age just gives you the freedom to do some things you've never done before. Great work can come at any stage of your life.”
Membership
Will was a longtime resident of the National Arts Club. He was an elected member of the National Academy of Design, the Century Association, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Barnet's work makes us experience the interplay between the personal and the universal.
Interests
Artists
John Singer Sargent
Connections
Will had three sons, Peter, Richard, and Todd Barnet, by his first wife Mary Sinclair. Barnet later married Elena Barnet, with whom he had a daughter, Ona Barnet.