Will Barnet
Will Barnet
1911 - 2012
Born 25 May 1911, in Beverly (Massachusetts); died 13 Nov 2012, in New York City.
Painter, draughtsman, engraver.
Will Barnet studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School between 1927 and 1930, then at the Art Students League. He taught at the Cooper Union (New York) and the New York Art Students League, and also gave lectures at several universities. He lives and works in New York.
His work draws on the old and modern masters in painting. Based on an attentive and considered observation of reality, his paintings are the result of numerous preparatory drawings, which are transferred on to the canvas with particularly diligent consideration for the composition and the organisation of the elements that occupy the space. Rather than creating it, his muted colour palette moulds with the arrangement of the form. In the 1930s he worked for the Work Projects Administration (WPA), a huge US-wide enterprise set up by Franklin Roosevelt's administration to help artists hit by the recession, which offered them thousands of commissions of all different kinds between 1935 and 1939. He started printing lithographs and making his own woodcuts, lithographs and etchings on the subject of the misery of man. A notable example is Desolation of 1935. In subsequent periods Barnet successively adopted elements of different styles: Post-Cubist, with Family and Pink Table (1948); abstract, with Big Duluth (1959-1960); and figurative and Symbolist with Mother and Child (1961), Atlantis (1975-1976) and Three Chairs (1991-1992).
The Musée-Galerie de la Seita in Paris presented some of his works in 1996 as part of the exhibition America in the Depression - Politically Committed Artists of the Thirties (L'Amérique de la Dépression - Artistes Engagés des Années Trente). The following are some of the numerous examples of solo exhibitions at which he has shown his work since 1938: 1938, Hudson Walker Gallery, New York; 1943, St-Étienne Gallery, New York; 1947, 1948, 1941, 1953, 1955 and 1961, Berthe Schaefer Gallery, New York; 1950, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas; 1960, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; 1964 and 1990, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; 1966, Waddell Gallery, New York; 1973, 1976 and 1981, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York; 1984, 1987 and 1988, Kennedy Galleries, New York; 1985, a travelling retrospective at the Currier Museum, the Alabama Museum, the Minnesota Museum, the Hamilton Art Gallery (Ontario) and the Farnsworth Museum; 1992 and 1994, Butler Institute of American Art; 1994, Philharmonic Center, Naples (Florida); 1994, Ogunquit Museum of American Art (Maine); 1994, Neuberger Museum; 1995, Worcester Art Museum; 1995, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington; and 2004, Montserrat Gallery, Beverly (Massachusetts). ["BARNET, Will." Benezit Dictionary of Artists. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 3, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/benezit/B00012118.]
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