My original plan for the day had been to see the Picasso exhibition at The Frick and to walk from there up Fifth Avenue to see this exhibition on 89th Street. When I read a day or so before going into the city that the Braque exhibition was opening on 79th Street, I decided to add that to the agenda. As it turned out, that made it possible to discover similarities and differences among the three artists that otherwise I might not have recognized.
As it regards their public audience, Picasso often seems to have spent as much time courting a public awareness of his work and in creating his famous artist persona as he did in actually making the work. Because he is credited with having made 30,000 works I can’t really say that his method was a detriment to his achievement. Braque received and ensured his lasting fame through his early close association with Picasso but seems to have removed himself from the limelight afterwards and to have just concentrated on getting his work done. Will Barnet, by contrast, seems always to have been preoccupied with the work and to have given little effort to participating in the New York art world hullaballoo. For the most part his is neither a household name nor one that first occurs to those listing important modern artists.
That is not to say that he is unknown in the art community. After studying for several years at the School of the Fine Arts in Boston, (he is native to Beverly, Mass.), he began his studies at the Art Students League in New York in 1930, under Stuart Davis, where he was introduced to Cubism. (As Davis was one of the Stieglitz late circle, and because Barnet’s ambitions were so similar to those of Hartley, Marin, and Dove, I am curious if Stieglitz was interested in any way in Barnet’s work) Upon completion of his studies Barnet began a thirty year teaching career at the League. He was one of the early and few modern art champions at the league and his tenure was not always easy. Among his students were Cy Twombley, Eva Hesse, and Al Held. He has taught as well at Cooper Union, Yale, The New School, the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, and others. He was also a participant in many of the artists’ ateliers.
Although he taught painting at the League he is better known for having been the director of the print studio and as a print maker and in sources other than the exhibition catalogue I have read that he was influential in reviving lithography as a fine art form in the mid twentieth century United States. In this position he worked with and as the printer for Raphael Soyer, Louise Bourgeois, and Jose Clemente Orozco.
His commitment to making art had been determined in his earliest years through his exposure to great art in the many museums in the Boston area. He has always believed that the work of the masters establishes a high professional standard that should be met by the modern artist and that it provides a working artist with the solutions to the many problems that one encounters in each new work. As reported in the catalogue, he has sometimes spent a year or more working out his compositions. Over the course of his lifetime his interests have gone beyond the western cannon and includes Asian, African, Egyptian, and Native American art as well. In much of his work one can see as well references to the itinerate early American painters. His deep knowledge of wide ranging fine arts masterworks can often be felt in the spirit, the essence of his work, and often seen in the paintings’ details, whereas Picasso was pleased to let the viewer continue to see the source directly quoted within his work.
Included in the catalogue is a reprint from The League Quarterly, Spring, 1950, in which Will Barnet briefly sets out his credo of picture making, commenting on nature as space, and how he attempts to balance horizontal and vertical spaces using forms and colors and illustrates this with reference to a medieval work in the Metropolitan Museum. As I read it I couldn’t help but remember Matisse’s statement: “What I dream of is an art of balance.”
Certainly balance is a central achievement in Barnet’s work. After some early works in which he employed the young man’s virtuoso brush work with thick impasto, he eventually confronted the reality of the flat quadrangle surface and resolved his plastic elements in a finish that is without evidence of brush work and which almost denies the presence of the painter. In this he is unlike Braque who was ever aware of the surface and reiterated that surface with sand, obvious brushwork, and pasted papers, making of it a tactile experience. For Braque the presence of the surface and the presence of the maker were vitally important: for Barnet it was always the expressiveness of the motif as an independent entity.
This is true in his figurative works and it is equally true in his hard line abstractions which in their shapes and in his palette again recall Braque. And this is one of the wonders of art: with any given subject, motif, each artist working with a full mastery of a common craft will create a unique work in his own penmanship: think of the work that Pissarro and Cezanne did side by side, think of analytic cubism after 1920, and see in the paintings here Barnet using that genre as a starting place but ending with making paintings by Will Barnet.
The line of his development begins with drawings of social commentary, his earliest influence was Daumier, then in New York he began to paint in the regionalist or New York street scene style. Once he moved into the printing shop he worked in lithography, woodcut, and etchings. Following his early studies at the League he began making hard edge abstract paintings, in the 1960’s he retuned to figurative work and continued with that in the areas of both painting and print making. In the1990’s, very late in his life, he returned to abstraction.
In the mid 1950’s Will Barnet seems to have hit his stride with his abstract work, notably, as seen here, Male and Female, Singular Image, and Positano. Positano in particular struck me as a triumph of ingenuity and simplicity. Now and then I see a painting that I think I would love to own, whatever it means to “own” a painting. I would love to own Positano.
In his figurative work his achievement seems restive until at last the paintings became flat on the surface. Once he was able to make that happen he proceeded with creating a visual experience expressive of feeling. All of his paintings, as seen here, reveal an intelligent and endlessly curious person, yet beyond that presence of intellect, there is a tremendously warm human relatedness and compassion.
His subjects are primarily members of his family: he believes that the family is the nucleus of the social order. His focus is on revealing the universal in the moment of common experience. While there is a consistent level of excellence through the mid 90’s, I am partial to those from the mid 1980’s, New England Family, the Three Chairs, as light and as fragrant as a spring day despite the chairs being, as they would be in a Braque painting, black, and Croquet, lovingly whimsical in its rigidity.
He has also accepted over 100 commissions for portraits and if the non family portrait in this exhibition, “Remi” is representative of that work then another exhibition is called for. This painting is a bold statement of the facts of color, line, and form but in perfect balance with the character of the sitter.
Returning to hard edge abstraction in his most recent work, he continues to meet his high level of standards. If anything these late abstract works are more engrossing than the earlier. Each of them has pictorial logic. Each of them has presence. Each of them has that quality of all great art in that if they have not always existed there is the sense that they should have: beyond what they might “mean”, they are absolutely right.
Even though his is not a household name Will Barnet has had a number of exhibitions in Museums and galleries over the years. I saw one of them just a year ago at the League; In addition he has been inducted into many fine arts organizations and has received many honors for his work and career. Many American museums have his works in their collections.
After giving much concentrated attention to modern painting these last few years, I have come to the conclusion that abstraction and abstract expressionism are minor movements within the larger cannon of western art. Abstraction lead to minimalism and finally to the statement that easel painting is dead. On the contrary I believe that man’s desire to paint, to make pictures, is as inherently human as is his desire to sing and to dance. I believe Picasso, and let’s not forget that he was the great twentieth century master, was right to retain the representative subject, almost always the human form, as the motif in his art. Obviously Braque agreed insofar as he maintained representation. The paintings of Will Barnet further convince me that this was the right decision, and that the human experience and the human form are the proper subject of art.
The Design Academy is an odd venue, recently renovated, in which the best use is made of rooms to the front and to the rear of a building with an architectural arrangement which has made the best of what I sense was an odd piece of property. If you go be sure to see the large circular Hera hanging over the elaborate grand stairway. At six feet in diameter it fits nicely into the space. It is a beautiful, luminous painting. However I found it difficult to see. I can’t remember if it was behind a chandelier centered over the curving stairway or if the light was just bad…it is a stairwell not a gallery. I was pleased to have no more than three or four other visitors in the galleries sharing the experience with me while I was there. How utterly civilized!
This past week Pablo Picasso turned 130. I suppose the exhibition at the Frick could have been called Picasso at 130. By contrast, Will Barnet at 100 celebrates the work of a painter who is still alive and still working. Do you suppose Pablito is lying in his grave green with envy?
There is only a notice regarding this exhibition on the Museum web page. But it will show you the other work they do there.
http://www.nationalacademy.org/pageview.asp?mid=3&pid=89
The Will Barnet pages at the Smithsonian American Art Museum show many of his 33 works in their collection:
http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/results/?page=1&num=10&image=0&view=0&name=&title=&keywords=&type=&subject=&number=&id=245
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment