This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  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."
Source:
Editor, "Will Barnet, Works of Six Decades" American Art Review, June-July 1994
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Biography from Hollis Taggart Galleries (Artists, A-D):
| Born in 1911 in Beverly, Massachusetts, as a child Barnet enjoyed climbing the hills to watch the ships in the harbor, playing baseball, and reading at the local public library. He was excited to discover the art section. As he remembers, “ I used to bury myself in those rooms day after day. It was practically my whole life. That’s where my first yearning for art began.” (1) At the age of 12 he established a studio in his parent’s basement where he drew and painted. He made frequent trips to Boston and Salem to explore the collections of the Peabody and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Continually dissatisfied with high school, in his last year he decided to leave. In 1927 Barnet enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where he learned drawing, painting, anatomy, and art history in the European tradition.
After several years, Barnet decided to continue his study at the Art Student’s League in New York, where he developed an interest in lithography, etching, and woodcutting. Between 1932 and 1942 Barnet became an avid printmaker, using the medium to capture the economic and social despair of the Depression years. He was a member of the Graphic Art Division of the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project and knew the Mexican artists José Clemente Orozco, for whom he printed lithographs, and Diego Rivera. In 1935 he married the painter and fellow student Mary Sincliar and the following year was appointed instructor of graphics at the Art Student’s League. He would subsequently teach at the New School for Social Research, at New Jersey State Teachers College, and from 1945-1978 at Cooper Union in New York.
Following the birth of his first son in 1938, Barnet made his wife and children his sole artistic subjects. He painted scenes of domesticity such as "Soft Boiled Eggs," 1946 and "Summer Family," 1948 (Philadelphia Museum of Art) using bright, emotive colors and cubist-inspired from. These abstractions attest to his careful study of the great modern artists such as Matisse, Picasso and, Léger. Focusing on images of family Barnet was “trying to purge himself of the subject, searching for the essence in the act of painting.” (2) However, this period domestic harmony was short-lived, as Barnet divorced his wife in 1952 and the following year married the modern dancer Elena Ciurlys.
Throughout the fifties and into the early sixties Barnet painted abstractly, moving from the figure to cityscape and landscape painting. Although he lived in Manhattan, he traveled frequently during this period in America and Europe. He spent summers in Provincetown Massachusetts, in Duluth Minnesota, where he taught a 1959 summer session at the University of Minnesota, and in Spokane, Washington, where he taught during the summer of 1963. While these trips fueled his interest in representing the American landscape through form and color, in the early sixties the figure reappeared as the primary subject in Barnet’s art. He painted portraits of his wife and daughter, as well as friend and artist Henry Pearson (Metropolitan Museum of Art), and collector Roy R. Neuberger. By the seventies he joined his interest in figurative and landscape painting in works that combined the female form with the organic images of forest, sky, and sea.
Over the course of his career Barnet exhibited extensively both in galleries and at major museums including the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Des Moines Art Center, and the Mint Museum. His works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota, the Museum of Modern Art, the University Art Museum, University of California at Berkeley, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.
1. Robert Doty, "Will Barnet" (New York: Harry N. Abrams), 20.
2. Ibid, 38.
© Copyright 2008 Hollis Taggart Galleries |
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.
Works
Barnet’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 Exhibitions
He 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 Honors
Barnet 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.
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