Good morning...here is a painting that captures what most of us have experienced, the inconvenience of trying to read with a cat on your lap! Woman Reading – Will Barnet, 1965 – Private Collection Born May 25, 1911 and died in 2012 at the age of 101. When he arrived in New York in 1931, Barnet was already radicalized – propelled as much by what he had witnessed growing up during the Depression as by the potential of artistic mediums and movements. He won a scholarship to the city’s independent school, the Art Students League. The institution was to become his second home; he learned printmaking there and for more than four decades was a cherished teacher to an array of 20th-century masters, including Mark Rothko. Barnet was as fluid an artist as with work spanning social realism, symbolism, portraiture and abstraction. In the 1930s his muse was the tough beat of city life. Through lithographs and sketches he captured harried scenes of cafeterias and fish markets. He moved on to dramatic abstraction in the 1950s as a member of the Indian Space Painters, a group of artists who fused American Indian imagery with the Modernism of European painters such as Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee. It was to be his poetic depictions of homesteads and family which finally brought him national acclaim in the 1970s. These included perhaps his most famous work, Woman Reading, in which Barnet’s wife, Elena, reclines in bed lost in a book and the company of her cat, Madame Butterfly. Barnet’s combination of bold block-colour schemes and intimate subject matter, composed with pared-down Japanese and Scandinavian influences, proved extremely popular. His works in this style were reprinted in poster editions across America. Will Barnet was born on May 25 1911 at Beverly, Massachusetts, into a family of Russian and East European immigrants. His father was a machinist in the local shoe factory, a small-town future Barnet railed against. He learned of art’s potential at an early age, both in the public library and in the town’s cemetery, where he studied the engravings on colonial gravestones. “At the age of 10 or 12,” he later stated, “I discovered that being an artist would give me an ability to create something which would live on after death.” Barnet had more than 80 solo exhibitions during his life. He worked until the end of his life, even after losing the use of a leg in 2003. His work sits in the collections of most of the major American museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, in addition to those of international institutions such as the British Museum and the Vatican Museum. In 2012, he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 11:40:26 +0000
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