Will Barnet
Birth Date: 1911
Death Date: 2012
Artist Gallery
Will Barnet was born in Beverly, Massachusetts in 1911. He studied and later taught at both the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Students League. He was a printmaker and painter known for elegantly stylized portraits and classically composed visions of beautiful women and children, died at the age of 101. His work over the past decade has dealt with the basic concepts of form, space and solitary women. He has also admired the poetry of Emily Dickinson, which so sensitively yet directly, spoke of solitude, a woman and nature. Barnet has always been firmly rooted in the American painting tradition where hints of loneliness, as well as vastness of space, have often been acknowledged by scholars to be underlying themes in American Art. In the prints and paintings that he produced from the mid-1960s on, Mr. Barnet ranged between a simplified form of realism and a poetic, visionary symbolism. Perhaps more than any of America’s representational artists, his work depicts a clarity and harmony over chaos and accident. In his art we see a contemplative classicism.