Will Barnet

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (July 2007)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Will Barnet (born 1911) has had one of the longest and most distinguished careers in the history of art, and he has used every moment of it to create an exceptional visionary body of paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, whose original style is recognized around the world. His works have entered virtually every major public collection in the United States, including, the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 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, and the Montclair Art Museum, among others. There have been innumerable critical considerations of his works in books, exhibition catalogues and magazine articles.

Born in 1911 in Beverly, Massachusetts, Barnet knew by the age of ten that he wanted to be an artist. As a student he studied with Philip Leslie Hale at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and viewed first-hand John Singer Sargent at work on the murals of the Boston Public Library. In 1930 Barnet studied at the Art Students League of New York, beginning his long association with the school. Here he concentrated on painting as well as printmaking, and in 1936 he became the official printer for the Art Students League. There, he later instructed students in the graphic arts at the school and taught alongside the likes of Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Robert Beverly Hale and Richard Pousette-Dart. Barnet continued his love of teaching with positions at the Cooper Union, at Yale University, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

During the 1930’s and early 1940’s, Barnet emerged as an illustrious artist. His paintings have become iconic works in the American art world. This imagery depicts the human figure and animals in both everyday casual occurrences and in transcendent dreamlike worlds. Though remaining universal, his works 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 women and girls, made from the 1970s onwards, notable the Silent Seasons series.

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^[1], 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.” Blessed with one of the most historically illustrious careers in art, Will Barnet has filled it with an iconic signature style of painting whose pertinence becomes more evident with each passing day. He was married twice and had three kids, Peter, Richard and Todd Barnet, from his first marriage. He has a daughter, Ona, by his second marriage to Elayna Corlys.