Will Barnet, American Master: An Exhibition in Honor of the Artist`s

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Will Barnet: A Brief Biography
Will Barnet was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1911. Attracted
to art at an early age, Barnet established his first studio in the cellar
of his family home. Self-directed studies in the local library’s art
room together with visits to nearby museums engendered an early
love of the Old Masters, especially Rembrandt, Jean-Antoine
Watteau and Honoré Daumier.
In 1928, Barnet entered the art school of the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston, where he studied with Impressionist Philip Hale and
absorbed the Boston art scene. After three years in Boston, Barnet
had sufficiently mastered the technical aspects of drawing and
painting; desiring to continue his art education in a more
Three Chairs (Summer Family), 1998
progressive environment, he moved to New York City and
©Will Barnet; Courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York
enrolled in the Art Students League of New York. There he
Photography: Stephen Stinehour Editions
practiced lithography in addition to painting, and in 1935 he
became the League’s official printer. Not long afterward, Barnet began teaching at the League, a pursuit which
would occupy him until his retirement in 1980.
Will Barnet, American Master: An Exhibition
in Honor of the Artist’s 100th Birthday
As SAMA celebrates its 35th anniversary in 2011, it seems
both fitting and proper to recognize Will Barnet in his 100th
year. SAMA is honored to present an exhibition of Barnet’s
work as a tribute to this talented artist and as a special
celebratory event in the Museum’s anniversary year. Barnet’s
birthday represents a noteworthy milestone in the life of
one of America’s most treasured artists. The Southern
Alleghenies Museum of Art is committed to providing those
residing in southwestern and central Pennsylvania with an
interesting, informative and enjoyable cultural experience
and Will Barnet, American Master: An Exhibition in Honor of the
Artist’s 100th Birthday is a reflection of that commitment.
Over his many years, Barnet has observed and experienced
a changing and, at times, turbulent art world. He saw the
rise of Abstract Expressionism, Social Realism and other Spring Morning, 1985
©Will Barnet; Courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York
avenues of artistic expression. To me, Barnet’s work, whether Photography: Stephen Stinehour Editions
abstract or figurative, stands the test of time because he stays
true to structure in his work. In the mid-1950s, amidst the American Abstract movement, Barnet pursued the abstract but
stated, he was “looking for structure in a period that was destroying structure.” Barnet developed what he called a “clearedge abstract geometric style” that is the essence of his later works.
In New York, Barnet’s steadily growing interest in modern art culminated in the 1940s with an extended series of
paintings exploring the formal possibilities of Expressionism, “primitive” art, and finally Abstraction. Together with
a small group of painters including Peter Busa and Steve Wheeler, Barnet explored “Indian Space,” a term coined
to describe the abstract design principles of Native American art.
Independent, dedicated, focused, talented, and visionary are words often referred to in describing the life and artistic career
of Will Barnet. In a letter (December 15, 1973) to Peter Barnet from Harold Rosenberg, we read, “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.” Through his art, Will Barnet takes us on a personal journey
that is well worth the trip.
Barnet devoted himself to abstract painting through the 1950s, but by the following decade he had returned to
figurative art. Printmaking again came to the fore and, utilizing the lessons learned from his lengthy foray into
Abstraction, the artist developed a new style that combined his humanist bent with his persistent interest in formal
design. For much of his subsequent career, Barnet has built on this fusion, resulting in a body of prints and paintings
that is unique, assured, and immediately recognizable.
This is a noteworthy exhibition with more than 40 works on display by this accomplished artist. A note of thanks is due Dr.
Scott Dimond for his work in curating this exhibition. I also thank Bobby Moore, SAMA Registrar, and the Museum staff for
their work in helping to make this exhibition program a success. I offer a special thanks to Alexandre Gallery, New York;
William Meek; and the Harmon-Meek Gallery, Naples, Florida, for their generosity in lending to the exhibition. I acknowledge
the Director’s Circle, Museum Associates, Education Patrons, Exhibition Patrons and other donors who give generously to help
make our work at Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art possible. My sincere appreciation is extended to all those individuals
who worked to make the Will Barnet exhibition a special experience for our constituents and the Museum in our 35th year.
And, a heartfelt happy 100th birthday to Will Barnet!
The majority of the figurative prints featured in this
exhibition represent three decades of my work, 19702000. The coherent artistic development and the
technical relationship between my painting and printmaking are most apparent in these years. The imagery in
this group of prints takes us from domestic intimacy to
private reflection to transcendent landscapes, yet all are
united by the ongoing exploration of line, form, tone and
expression.
Editors:
Mr. and Mrs. William Benzel
Miss Susan F. Crary
The Donald & Sylvia Robinson Family Foundation
Franciscan Friars, T.O.R.
Mr. and Mrs. Guy Paden Gamble
Mrs. Shirley D. Lingenfelter
Mr. and Mrs. Harry McCreary
Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Dean Nelson
The Rev. Sean M. Sullivan, T.O.R.
Travis Mearns
Bobby Moore
MUSEUM ASSOCIATES
Mrs. Mary Weidlein
EDUCATION SPONSORS
C & G Savings Bank
Central Pennsylvania Community Foundation
Mr. and Mrs. John K. Duggan, Jr.
Harold & Betty Cottle Family Foundation
Pennsylvania Council on the Arts
Mr. and Mrs. Gerald P. Wolf
The wide audience I have found through my prints and
the rewarding relationships I have formed with so many
collectors of these works has always been a source of great
pleasure to me. I hope this exhibition at the Southern
Alleghenies Museum of Art will add a new generation
to this privilege.
EXHIBITION SPONSORS
Dr. and Mrs. Magdi Azer
Hon. and Mrs. Timothy Creany
Mr. and Mrs. Donald Devorris
Neil and Marilyn Port Family Foundation
Mrs. Shirley Pechter
©Marc Royce, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York
Printer:
Advanced Color Graphics
Catalogue Design:
Color Scan LLC
© 2011 Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art
This catalogue is published by the
Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art
Post Office Box Nine
Loretto, PA 15940
(814) 472-3920
Hours:
Tuesday through Friday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Saturday: 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Closed Sundays and Mondays
Admission is free
Cover:
Atalanta, 1975
Serigraph, artist’s proof, 30” x 23”
Gift of the artist; Courtesy of Harmon-Meek Gallery
by the A
ED
M
IT
✱
N ASSO
ICA
CI
ER
Will Barnet
New York City, 2011
DIRECTOR’S CIRCLE
• ACCR
MS
ED
EU
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
G. Gary Moyer
Executive Director
OF MU
ION
S
AT
Barnet continues to work from his New York studio, and over the course of his long life he has held dozens of
exhibitions and several important retrospectives. His work is represented in numerous public collections, including
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. SAMA
is proud to host the present exhibition in honor of the artist’s 100th birthday, and to include a variety of his prints
in its permanent collection.
August 5, 2011 - October 15, 2011
Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art at Loretto
Curator’s Statement
Although Barnet’s critics admired his abstract work, the artist
resumed figurative work during the following decade. His
new compositions were marked by the formal clarity and
flatness of his abstract work, but at the same time, they also
invoked the broad humanism of his early prints. Family
members reappeared as well, both as themselves and as
models for Barnet’s retooled humanist vision. In one such
work, the 1973 lithograph, Woman by the Sea, the artist recalls
the work of the nineteenth-century German Romantics in his
image of a seafarer’s wife looking for the return of her absent
husband. An effective metaphor for individual loneliness and
humanity’s existential longing, Woman by the Sea belongs to a
group of similar images that Barnet was inspired to make as a
result of summers spent on the Maine coast.
Furthering the themes that he had developed in his Indian
Space work, the artist continued to explore universal ideas
touching on spirituality, myth, and the absolutes of human
experience. To convey a sense of the iconic and eternal, Barnet
looked again to ancient sources, especially Greece. Atalanta,
modeled by Barnet’s daughter Ona, is one of several 1970s
works featuring heroines of Greek mythology. Although little
in the composition directly invokes the story of Atalanta’s race
and her defeat through Melanion’s ruse of the golden apple,
the title lends a sense of antiquity that complements the
fathomless sea and endless sky, recurring elements in Barnet’s
oeuvre that suggest spiritual tranquility and cosmic grandeur.
Interlude, 1982 ©Will Barnet; Courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York
Photography: Stephen Stinehour Editions
W
ill Barnet has spent much of his long career on an
artistic quest. Beginning with what he knows most
intimately, he has moved outward, seeking the mythical and
eternal. Evocations of antiquity and the “primitive” find
their place alongside the contemporary language of
Abstraction, resulting in a remarkably diverse body of work.
Yet this work is united in expressing a single theme: The
Universal embodied in the familiar.
From his early days as an artist steeped in the SocialRealist milieu of New York in the 1930s, Barnet strove to
capture a sense of timeless dignity in even the most
mundane subjects.
Street children, neighborhood
characters, his wife and first child are common themes in
Barnet’s first works. Eschewing the satire of a Reginald
Marsh, or the heavy sermons of a Ben Shahn, Barnet created
images that were documentary in nature, but infused with
his own humanist poetry. Prints such as Makeshift Kitchen,
Mother and Child, and The Tailor are marked by solid, almost
monumental forms and an aura of quiet pathos that is not so
much topical commentary as it is an echo of the greater
tragedy of human existence. In this, Barnet parallels
nineteenth-century French masters such as Jean-François
Millet or Honoré Daumier, the latter a favorite early
influence whose ferocious wit was transformed by Barnet
into a meditative serenity that verges on the sacred.
As Barnet’s family grew, he began to focus more exclusively
on domestic subjects. At the same time, during the 1940s, he
moved away from the prevailing realist aesthetic to
experiment with more expressive approaches to artmaking.
Unlike most American modernists, who were looking to the
innovations of the Cubists and the Fauves, Barnet found
inspiration in the flat planes and charged geometry
of Native American art. On one hand, this gave a
nationalistic tone to his modernist approach; on the other, it
invoked the mysterious and resonant aura of Native
American culture. This invocation of ageless spirituality
paralleled the Abstract Expressionists’ exploration of myth
and dream imagery, yet in contrast to the epic presentations
of Pollock or Kline, Barnet expressed it in such ordinary
subjects as Go-Go, a portrait of the artist’s child holding a toy
duck. With its flat planes, zigzag patterns, and earthy colors,
Barnet employed his knowledge of what he called “Indian
Space” to create an image of childhood that is both vibrant
and iconically powerful.
Barnet’s unique combination of personal associations,
historical referents, and formal design principles has coalesced
into a body of prints and paintings that are perhaps the bestknown of the artist’s eighty-plus year career. Over the last
three decades, Barnet has refined and expanded his approach
while simultaneously bringing new motifs and influences into
his artmaking. Works of the 1980s, such as Peter Grimes
and Spring Morning, build on earlier themes, reworking
compositional strategies, multiplying figures, and shifting
mood in a manner akin to the elaborations of the jazz
musician. At the same time, however, the original subject
matter of The Blue Bicycle or The Skater reveals an artist who
has remained always on the lookout for fresh pictorial
challenges. Grandchildren have now joined Barnet’s family
circle, and appear in a number of works from the 1990s
on. During this time, the symbolic gestures and hieratic
organization of Egyptian, Greek, and Byzantine art received
new emphasis in both paintings and prints, including The
Artist and His Dealer and Three Chairs (Summer Family). Most
recently, Barnet has returned to Abstraction, revisiting Indian
Space with the added perspective of more than half a century
working in the turbulent world of American and international
contemporary art.
Barnet explored another avenue for spiritual expression in
his 1952 lithograph, Play, a reductively stylized depiction of
mother and child. Believing that children had unfettered
access to the spiritual insights that he saw reflected in Native
American and other “primitive” art, Barnet carefully studied
their drawings. He admired the ability of the child artist to
get right to the heart of the subject in his or her drawings,
and in Play, he strove to emulate the directness and,
ultimately, the absoluteness that gives children’s art its
peculiar power.
Barnet’s work turned mainly to painting during the 1950s.
For much of that time, his work was almost completely
abstract as he pushed Indian Space to its limits. Although he
retained Native American design principles, he moved away
from literal quotations of Indian motifs. Like many abstract
painters, Barnet sought combinations of form and color that
would transcend representational imagery. Breaking down
the distinction between figure and ground, he attempted
to unite the elements of his paintings behind a single
expressive force that would communicate feeling and mood
without the limiting specificities of subject, culture, and time
period.
The Blue Robe, 1971
©Will Barnet; Courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York
Photography: Stephen Stinehour Editions
Woman by the Sea, 1973
©Will Barnet; Courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York
Photography: Stephen Stinehour Editions
Today, at the age of 100, Will Barnet continues to work and to
search for the Universal through his art. Style, form, and
content are significant, but not in and of themselves; rather,
they are the means by which the artist accomplishes a noble
task. With indefatigable enthusiasm, Barnet shows us that the
deep things of life are near at hand and that in the familiar, one
may find the transcendent. Such are the conclusions of the
wise, and through his work, it may be fairly said that Barnet
possesses wisdom beyond his years.
V. Scott Dimond, July 2011
Waiting, 1976
©Will Barnet; Courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York
Photography: Stephen Stinehour Editions
Polly, Minou, and Eon, 1979
©Will Barnet; Courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York
Photography: Stephen Stinehour Editions
The Walk, 2001
©Will Barnet; Courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York
Photography: Stephen Stinehour Editions