Artist

Will Barnet

born Beverly, MA 1911-died New York City 2012
Media - portrait_image_113319.jpg - 89903
Born
Beverly, Massachusetts, United States
Died
New York, New York, United States
Nationalities
  • American
Biography

Painter and printmaker, teacher at the Art Students League. Barnet's images of women and domestic scenes, distinctive in their emphasis on flat painting surfaces, are meditative in tone.

Joan Stahl American Artists in Photographic Portraits from the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection (Washington, D.C. and Mineola, New York: National Museum of American Art and Dover Publications, Inc., 1995)

Artist Biography

Between 1927 and 1930 Barnet studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and in the mid 1930s he taught in New York at the Art Students League and the New School for Social Research. Throughout his career Barnet has been a figurative artist, although in the late 1940s he experimented with eliminating realistic space and began using semiabstract forms to convey what he felt were substances and forces in nature. In the mid 1950s, he reduced his images to simple pictographs, although basic human shapes could still be discerned. Around 1960, however, he became dissatisfied with his attempts to unite human and abstract forms, and sought a fresh approach. Starting in 1962, when he exhibited a new series of paintings that reasserted the human figure as his primary subject matter, Barnet has continued to explore themes of meditation and human relationships.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)

Luce Artist Biography

Will Barnet studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, then moved to New York in 1930 to attend the Art Students League. He worked as a printer for the school and experimented with techniques such as lithography, etching, and woodcutting. After his first son was born, Barnet began a series of paintings that show scenes of family life. He experimented with abstraction for several years, aiming to "eliminate realistic space" in favor of simple geometric forms. His later work was more representational and focused almost entirely on the female form, emphasizing the contrast between natural curves and rigidly composed backgrounds of horizontal and vertical forms. ("Will Barnet, Works of Six Decades," American Art Review, June-July 1994)

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Exhibitions

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Graphic Masters III: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
January 15, 2010–August 7, 2010
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Graphic Masters III: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the third in a series of special installations, celebrates the extraordinary variety and accomplishment of American artists' works on paper. These twenty-eight exceptional watercolors, charcoals, and drawings from the 1960s to the 1990s reveal the central importance of works on paper for American artists, both as studies for creations in other media and as finished works of art. Traditionally a more intimate form of expression than painting or sculpture, drawings often reveal greater spontaneity and experimentation. Even as works on paper become larger and more finished, competing in scale with easel paintings, they retain a sense of the artist's hand, the immediacy of a thought made visible.
Media - 1986.6.92 - SAAM-1986.6.92_3 - 135150
Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection
February 28, 2014–August 16, 2014
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection presents some of the most treasured artworks from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s permanent collection, including works by Will Barnet, Isabel Bishop, Paul Cadmus, Arthur Dove, Nancy Grossman, Edward Hopper, Wolf Kahn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jacob Lawrence, Reginald Marsh, Ben Shahn, and Honoré Sharrer, among others. The exhibition includes seventy paintings and sculpture from the 1910s to the 1980s that encompass the range of what can broadly be called modern realism, from socio-political to psychological, from satirical to surrealist. The artworks on display were selected by Virginia Mecklenburg, chief curator at the museum.
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Modern American Realism: Highlights from the Sara Roby Foundation Collection
October 20, 2018–November 28, 2018
Smithsonian American Art Museum
This exhibition presents some of the most treasured paintings and sculpture from SAAM’s permanent collection, including artworks by Will Barnet, Isabel Bishop, Paul Cadmus, Edward Hopper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jacob Lawrence, George Tooker, among others.