: Will Barnet, the 93-year-old artist whose paintings and prints
have for decades defined him as a major American artist, is the
subject of an exhibition at the art college in his hometown,
Montserrat College of Art. The exhibition, "Will Barnet: My
Father's House," curated by Montserrat Gallery Director Katherine
French, focuses on his work - much of it never before shown. It
features paintings, drawings and prints dating from 1937 through
1992 and is on view through November 23.
The exhibition focuses on Barnet's sense of family and memories
of Beverly.
Over the course of a productive career spanning more than seven
decades, Will Barnet has made his mark as an innovative painter,
pioneering printmaker and respected teacher. Still going strong,
he is The Grand Old Man of American Art.
Gentle and generous, Barnet is admired for his qualities as a
human being, as well as an artist. He is acclaimed by generations
of students and art observers for his adherence to classical
traditions of order, harmony and stability, as well as his
commitment to experimental forms of portraiture and genre.
Drawing on a wide range of influences, including El Greco,
Vermeer, Rembrandt, Daumier, Cézanne, Eakins, Kandinsky, Léger,
Picasso, Hartley, Dove and Stuart Davis, plus Byzantine and
Native American art, over the years his work has ranged from the
Social Realism of the 1930s to Indian Space abstractions in the
40s and 50s to the domestic figuration of recent decades.
"Although the range of Barnet's accomplishments is vast, his
entire body of work is unified by the artist's sacred devotion to
classical principles of order, stability, harmony and grace,"
according to Gail Stavitsky, chief curator at The Montclair Art
Museum. She organized an outstanding retrospective, "Will Barnet"
A Timeless World," that toured in 2000-2001.
One of America's most important living artists, Barnet has
collected boatloads of honors and awards. He is an Academician of
the National Academy of Design and a member of The American
Academy of Arts and Letters. He is represented in such
prestigious collections as the Guggenheim Museum; Metropolitan
Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art;
National Gallery of Art; Vatican Museum and Whitney Museum of
American Art, as well as the Farnsworth Art Museum and Portland
Museum of Art in Maine. Barnet's work has been the subject of
more than 100 solo exhibitions in museums and galleries.
Born in coastal Beverly, just north of Boston, in 1911, Barnet
was the youngest of four children of Russian immigrant parents.
He gained his work ethic from his father, who labored long hours
as a machinist in a Beverly shoe factory. From his mother he
learned a sensitivity to people. The Barnet household was
enlivened by dogs, cats and talking parrots, who appear often in
Barnet's art.
Growing up in a port city, with historic Salem nearby, he was
exposed to a handsome and rich colonial environment proud of its
patriotic heritage and maritime traditions. A precocious
youngster, he read widely in American history, world literature
and art history and made art in a "studio" in the family cellar.
As a teenager he received solid training in the disciplines of
French academic art while studying under Impressionist painter
Philip Leslie Hale at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in
Boston. Copying works of the Old Masters, especially Rembrandt
and Daumier, "reinforced Barnet's socially conscious interests in
the human condition," says Stavitsky.
Concluding that, as he put it, "Boston was too small," at 18
Barnet set out for New York bent on a career as an artist. He
began a half-century association with the Art Students League as
a student in 1930. Among his teachers were Thomas Hart Benton and
Stuart Davis. Jackson Pollock was a fellow student.
A largely self-taught master printer by age 23, Barnet became the
youngest instructor of graphic arts ever at the ASL, where he
taught until 1981. By all accounts an effective, demanding,
humane and unfailingly helpful instructor, Barnet became,
according to Stavitsky, "one of the best and most influential
teachers in America." Among his prominent pupils were Audrey
Flack, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Cy
Twombly and Tom Wesselman.
Barnet was also on the faculty at Cooper Union, Yale, Cornell and
the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
The style and content of Barnet's early lithographic work,
created at the onset of the Great Depression, reflected his keen
interest in Daumier's social satire and the massive forms of
Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco's socially engaged work.
His output also drew on his lifelong fascination with people
going about the activities of everyday life. Throughout his
career Barnet has demonstrated a rare ability to transform the
reality of the human experience into affirmations of the beauty
and even heroic dignity of life.
In what he called "social statements" in the 1930s, he conveyed
the violence of the time in Orazco-influenced lithographs such as
"Conflict," 1934, and captured the tragic fate of individuals
ground down during the Depression in paintings like "Idle Hands,"
1935, a simple and moving image of a slumped over, dejected man
in a slouch cap.
In 1935 Barnet married Mary Sinclair, who was to become mother of
their two sons. That same year he had his first solo exhibition
at New York's Eighth Street Playhouse.
While working on a WPA project in the 1940s, Barnet met Mexican
mural painters Orazco and Diego Rivera, who introduced him to the
formal beauty of Indian art. In the late 1940s and 50s Barnet was
associated with the Indian Space Painters, notably Steve Wheeler,
a group of American modernists who combined avant-garde
techniques with two-dimensional motifs from Native American art,
with some Surrealist touches.
Rejecting the raw painterly approach of Abstract Expressionism
and seeking to break away from European influences, Barnet found
special inspiration in the art of the Indians of the Northwest
Coast and of the Southwest. He was "struck by...the ability of
Native American artists to use abstract designs that projected
dynamic movement, balance and emotion in positive space,"
according to Twig Johnson, curator of Native American Art at The
Montclair Art Museum.
This Indian art inspiration led to a series of linear
pictographs, abstracted from natural forms, filled with colorful
and appealing, albeit often enigmatic, images. These tightly
orchestrated paintings, characterized by beautifully worked out
biomorphic and geometric forms, organized into a harmonious
balance, bear such titles as "Self-Portrait," 1948-49 and
1953-54; and "Fourth of July," 1954. Some observers feel that
these large canvases, with their successful assimilation of
Indian influences into highly contemporary painting modes, are
the works for which Barnet will be best remembered.
Divorced from his first wife, in 1953 Barnet married
Lithuanian-born Elena Ciurlys, who became his devoted muse and
partner.
Images of his handsome wife, with her distinctive almond-shaped
eyes, his comely brunette daughter, Ona, and eventually her
growing children have played major roles in Barnet's oeuvre over
the succeeding half century. Many of these paintings have been
translated into widely admired prints.
While some critics were uneasy about the combinations of
abstraction and representation in Barnet's work, many observers
applauded their formal restraint, perceptiveness and
sophistication. "Throughout his career," wrote Farnsworth
director Christopher Crosman in a 2002 exhibition catalog,
"Barnet has retained a strong abstract sensibility through
reductive, flattened forms and exquisitely balanced compositions.
He was...among the first and few artists to successfully take on
one of the great dilemmas of modernism: that is, the seamless
union of a classically formal language of abstraction combined
with deeply human and poetic content - content that is widely
accessible to people of all backgrounds and levels of interest in
art."
While spending all his professional life in Manhattan, New
England has always been in Barnet's thoughts. He has summered in
Maine for years and returned frequently to Beverly to look in on
his last remaining, aging sister Eva, who lived on in the house
where they all grew up. Haunted by memories of departed family
members, she led a reclusive existence filled with anxiety and
hallucinations.
Barnet's visits prompted a series of somber, rather ghostly,
works that evoked the isolated life and hermetic environment in
which his sister lived. In these images Barnet sought, as he put
it, to "capture the interior emotions of my family's existence,
my relationship to them, as well as the atmosphere of the house,
rooms and abstract sense of light."
The Montserrat exhibition focuses on a series of paintings
completed after the deaths of his sisters in the early 1990s, in
which Barnet explores his feelings of profound loss. The works
capture the interior emotions of his family's existence and his
relationship to them, as well as the atmosphere of the house,
rooms and abstract sense of light. The accompanying drawings
range in date from the early 1930s to the 1990s. Many serve as
studies for later paintings. All prints in the exhibit are from
1937 and depict Barnet's father resting after a hard day's work.
In the painting "My Father's House," Barnet depicted his sister
Eva standing behind a screened door, reluctant to step out onto
the porch. Above her, windows glow with visions of a family who
have returned to spend time together.
The exhibition is the result of a two-year collaboration between
the artist and French, who worked directly with Barnet,
conducting interviews and curating the exhibit with work from his
own collection. Although much of it had been stored away and had
not been seen by the artist or his wife since the 1940s and
1950s, the paintings have been exhibited once, during a very
brief show in New York. This is the first time all these works
have appeared together.
While exhibiting extensively in New York and in Europe, Barnet
has not exhibited work on the North Shore since a retrospective
exhibition at the Essex Institute in 1980. This handsome
exhibition underscores what a living treasure Will Barnet is, and
why he is one of the finest artists in Twentieth Century American
art.
A 27-page color catalog is available for purchase for $20 from
the Montserrat Gallery Office, 978-921-4242, ext 1204. The museum
is at 23 Essex Street.
