Will Barnet

In 2001, Will Barnet made a gift of Seventy-five drawings to the Arkansas Arts Center. Significantly, the drawings cover a range from 1929 to 1990, allowing visitors a chance to review this artist's life work. Known as a painter, draftsman and printmaker, Will Barnet is a significant force in 20th century American art. In the 1930s, he demonstrated a mastery of the Social Realist tradition. Along with Peter Busa and Steve Wheeler, Barnet contributed to the "Indian Space" movement. Later he became directly involved with the American abstract movement. Born in 1911 in Massachusetts and educated in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Art Students League, New York City, Barnet has been widely influential in his teaching. He has held positions at the Art Student League, Cooper Union (1945-1978), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Cornell University, Yale University and other schools. (AAC)-----------------http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/arts/design/will-barnet-painter-dies-at-101.html?_r=0 11-13-2012New York Times November 13, 2012Will Barnet, Visionary Artist, Dies at 101By KEN JOHNSON Published: November 13, 2012 Will Barnet, a printmaker and painter known for elegantly stylized portraits and classically composed visions of beautiful women and children, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 101. His death was announced by Philippe Alexandre, whose gallery represented him. He had lived in the National Arts Club building on Gramercy Park since 1982. In the prints and paintings that he 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. In the enigmatic pictures he began making in the 1970s, he conjured images of women in dark woods or on the porches of seaside houses who appear to be waiting for loved ones like 19th-century sailors’ wives. A native of Beverly, Mass., Mr. Barnet attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and, on a scholarship, went to New York to study at the Art Students League, arriving in 1931, he once said, with $10 and a portfolio of seascapes and portraits of the family cat. He 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. “I didn’t compromise, ever,” he said in an interview with The New York Times on the occasion of the exhibition. “The old masters are still alive after 400 years, and that’s what I want to be.” Mr. Barnet was born on May 25, 1911. His father, Noah, who had immigrated from Russia, was a machinist in a shoe factory. His mother, Sarahdina, 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. He is survived by his wife, as well as his sons from his first marriage — Peter, a painter; Richard, a sculptor; and Todd, a lawyer — and the daughter from his second marriage, Ona, who owns and operates an inn in Maine; and seven grandchildren. 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 this 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. Mr. Barnet’s first encounters with art were the carvings of skeletal heads and other images on colonial tombstones in a local cemetery in Beverly. “These were mementos of what had taken place,” he recalled. “At the age of 10 or 12, I discovered that being an artist would give me an ability to create something which would live on after death.” Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.A version of this article appeared in print on November 14, 2012, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Will Barnet, Visionary Artist, Dies at 101.---------------------------------http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/2aa/2aa233.htm 7-11-2011Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine 1-207-775-6148 or 1-800-639-4067 http://www.portlandmuseum.orgWill Barnet: A Timeless World Will Barnet is an artist of unusual skill, refinement, and sense of beauty. Over the years he has worked in several modes, but his creations are unified by a sensibility founded on the search for order and harmony. Long ago, Will Barnet reached a firm. decision as to what painting was to be for him, and he has held to this purpose in disregard of prevailing fashions or dogmas.------(Harold Rosenberg, letter to Peter Barnet, December 15, 1973) Born in Beverly, Massachusetts in 1911, Will Barnet studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from 1927 to 1931. He then completed his formal education at the Art Students League in 1935 when he was appointed professional printer of the institution. Concentrating on lithography, Barnet became a greatly respected teacher at the League in 1941, and disseminated his appreciation of art history, modernism, and Native American art to many inspired pupils into the 1980s. Barnet's sphere of influence was also extended while teaching at many other institutions, including Cooper Union, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Cornell University, Yale University, the University of Minnesota, and George Washington University. Since his first one-man exhibition at New York's Eighth Street Playhouse in 1935, and the Hudson Walker Gallery in 1938, Will Barnet achieved recognition as an independent, highly dedicated painter-printmaker who pursued his own vision, rooted in personal experience and classical aesthetic concepts, ignoring the vagaries of the art world. This emphasis upon Barnet's personal direction is often referred to as the abstract body of work that postdated the artist's figurative Social Realist prints and paintings of the 1930s, inspired by Barnet's appreciation of Giotto, Vermeer, Daumier, and Orozco.During the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the late 40's and 50's, Barnet developed what he called a "clear-edge" abstract geometric style that formed the foundation for his later figure and portrait painting. He especially found inspiration in the Gallatin Collection where Cubist works by Picasso and Gris reinforced Barnet's "love of purity and geometry in painting, the beauty of a flat surface, a cohesive quality of structure and clear forms." Also important to Barnet was his learned appreciation of Byzantine, African, Asian, Oceanic, and Native American art.Until recently, Barnet's Abstract works of the late '40s through the mid-'60s have often been discussed as evidence of his independence from Abstract Expressionism and hence the art world. This interpretation did not acknowledge the complexities of the era and Barnet's important connections with others sharing his concerns, especially his fellow Indian Space Painters and members of the American Abstract Artists. Now that revisionist scholars such as Susan C. Larsen, Ann Gibson, Sandra Kraskin, and W. Jackson Rushing have challenged the dominant paradigm of Abstract Expressionism to expose the diversity of this era, it becomes possible to re-examine Barnet's contributions in this new context.Barnet's Abstract explorations reveal his affinities with the work of his Indian Space colleagues Peter Busa and Steve Wheeler and recent research by Stavitsky and Johnson illuminates Barnet's pivotal role in aspects of the Indian Space Movement.Also important is Barnet's involvement with the American Abstract Artists, founded in 1936, which he joined in 1954 when he was ". . .looking for structure in a period that was destroying structure." His relationship with this group, especially leading critic-painter George L. K. Morriss, has never been fully examined. Additionally, the exhibition considers for the first time Barnet's relationship to post-painterly abstraction and Color Field painting, especially Ellsworth Kelly, Ad Reinhardt, Leon Polk Smith and others who have been identified as pioneers of hard-edge painting during the 1950s and '60s.Although Barnet has pursued abstraction for many years, his fascination with human beings, especially his family, never waned. In the early 1960s he launched a series of family portraits that achieved a balance between the formal demands of abstraction and the humanist aspects of representation to present modern yet timeless versions of traditional mother and child themes.From the late 1960s onwards, Barnet created a series of allegorical paintings of the seasons and other subjects. A desire to explore his New England heritage led to an ongoing series begun in Maine during the 1970s of women and sea. Although these meditative, linear paintings recall the work of Piero della Francesca and Ingres, they also have strong connections to Barnet's earlier work in terms of their humanist vision and unified, classical compositions, balancing geometric and biomorphic forms in compressed spaces. Thus an underlying modernist architectural structure characterizes all of Barnet's work -- figurative or abstract. http://www.artnet.com 4-21-08) 1911 Born, Beverly, MA 1927 - 1933 Art Education at Boston Museum of Fine Arts School 1978 Elected Fellow of Royal Society of Arts London, England 1982 Elected to American Academy and Institute of Arts 1989 Awarded Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA Exhibitions 2003 Will Barnet: A Poster Retrospective, Digital Sandbox Gallery, New York, NY 2003 Six Indian Space Artists: Will Barnet, Robert Barrell, Gertrude Barrer, Peter Busa, Howard Daum, Steve Wheeler, David Findlay Jr Inc., New York, NY 2000 - 2001 Traveling Solo Retrospective, Montclair Art Museum Montclair, NJ 1995 National Museum of American Art Washington, D.C. 1983 Solo retrospective exhibit, Wichita Art Museum Wichita, KS 1980 Retrospective, Documents, Paris, France 1973 Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, NY 1956 New York University Art Gallery, New York, NY 1943 Galerie St. Etienne, New York, NY 1943 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA http://www.askart.com/AskART/artists/biography.aspx?searchtype=BIO&artist=24350 7-8-2011This biography from the Archives of AskART:from "Will Barnet, Works of Six Decades" American Art Review, June-July 1994: From Beverly, Massachusetts, Will Barnet became a leading 20th-century New York based artist, best known for figurative paintings enhanced by abstract arrangements and printmaking. He was a key figure in the New York movement called Indian Space Painting, artists who based their abstract and semi-abstract work on Native American art.Barnet studied at the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 1928 to 1930, and then at the Art Students League in New York, where he focused on printmaking. He taught briefly at Cornell, Yale, Cooper Union, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Museum School, Boston. In 1934, he became the printer for the League, and from 1945 to 1980 was Instructor of Painting at the League. Throughout his career he worked in both woodcuts, etching, and lithographs. Barnet was quoted: "I wasn't so concerned with beautiful line, mass interested me more than line. The hardest thing is to take line and make it into something that is contained." His woodcuts are starkly black and white, and the lithographs have a full range of tones.Until 1939, his style was realistic, but he did many abstract paintings of social realist themes between 1940s and 1960, but they were much more controlled than those of many of his contemporary Abstract Expressionist peers. In fact, many of his pieces were purely geometric, exploring the rectangle. In the latter part of his career of over 80 years, he explored both abstraction and realism, with all of them carefully executed. Robert Doty, art historian, called Barnet, "a master of the abstract statement. . .creating images of personal vision which rank with the best of their time."Biography from Ebo Gallery: Will Barnet was born in 1911. Mr. Barnet trained at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School and the Art Students League New York. By 1936 he had established himself as a professional printer and the youngest instructor of graphic arts ever to hold a faculty position at the Arts Students League. He later taught art at such leading American schools as Yale University and Cornell University.By the 1940s, Barnet was well known as a painter and printmaker. A prolific graphic artist, Barnet changed his style significantly at different points in his career. His earliest works were influenced by expressionism; they were followed by abstract works in the 1950s and 1960s, and finally evolved into more figurative works of silhouetted forms set against geometrically designed backgrounds.His work has been exhibited in prominent museums and galleries in the United States and Canada and is included in many prestigious collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.WorksBarnet’s works, while remaining universal, reference his own personal history complete with images of his wife, his daughter and their family pets. As James Thomas Flexner wrote, Barnet’s work “makes us experience the interplay between the personal and the universal.” While remaining representational, the simple elegance of the figures and their flat surfaces reflect his exploration with abstraction. He was a key figure in the New York movement called Indian Space Painting, artists who based their abstract and semi-abstract work on Native American art. For many years he pursued abstraction in painting, then a fashionable trend in the USA. His later work returned to figurative painting. He is probably best know for his enigmatic portraits of family, made from the 1970s onwards, notable the Silent Seasons series. However, his earlier works maintain an edginess and brooding contemplation that is even more remarkable when compared with the more placid and pretty works which followed his second marriage.Selected ExhibitionsHe has been the subject of over eighty solo exhibitions held at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design Museum, the National Museum of American Art, Montclair Art Museum,and the Boca Raton Museum of Art among others.Awards and HonorsBarnet has been the recipient of numerous awards including the first Artist’s Lifetime Achievement Award Medal given on the occasion of the National Academy of Design’s 175th anniversary, the College Art Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art’s Lippincott Prize, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters’ Childe Hassam Prize. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Design, The Century Association, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Barnet has defined an artistic career that, in the words of Robert Doty, “has always gone beyond the limitations of modern art because his work affirms a faith in life.”Mr. Barnet, now 98, still works every day. Biography from Rogallery.com: Will Barnet was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, and studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School and then at the Art Students League in New York. He cites Daumier as his first great inspiration at the age of 14, both for "his profound vision of life and his unequalled draftsmanship." From the earliest years, Barnet valued concept equally with technique. Printmaking gave him a wider, freer means of expression although painting has remained another important medium throughout his career.His work of the 1930s and 1940s deals with the social themes in the forefront of the Depression era, but also the more personal theme of the mother and child. He later taught art at such leading American schools as Yale University, Cornell University, and the Art Students League (1936-1981) and at Cooper Union (1948 - 1978). He was a visiting professor at many colleges. Among his students at Copper Union were Mark Rothko and Cy Twombly. Christopher B. Crosman, director of the Farnsworth Museum, states the mark of a great teacher is "to insist on individual integrity and the value of finding one's own vision and artistic voice." Crosman called Barnet "one of the art world's great humanitarians-mentor, exemplar, helping hand, and wise friend (Will Barnet: The Nineties).A prolific graphic artist, Barnet changed his style significantly at different points in his career. His earliest works were influenced by Expressionism; they were followed by abstract works in the 1950s and 1960s, and finally evolved into more figurative works of silhouetted forms set against geometrically designed backgrounds. Barnet has worked in most print media. Barnet's exhibition record extends from 1934 to 2002 and includes the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.His work is in the collections of American museums including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Art Institute of Chicago,; Corcoran Gallery of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; National Gallery of Art; Phillips Collection; Seattle Art Museum; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------