The Alexandre Gallery in New York City is pleased to announce the exhibition “Will Barnet: A Tribute.” Surveying Barnet’s long and productive career, the show will include nine paintings and related works on paper – prints, drawings and watercolors –spanning dates from 1937 to 2010 and marks the first exhibition of Barnet’s work since his death at the age of 101 in 2012. An illustrated catalogue with text by Christopher Crosman is available from the gallery.

Will Barnet arrived in New York from Boston at the age of twenty in 1931 to enroll at the Art Students League and pursue a life as an artist. There he studied with Stuart Davis, Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock, among others. During this formative period Barnet supported himself as a master printmaker and teacher, enabling his early, lasting connection to the New York scene. Barnet continued making his own prints until the last year of his life and remained active as a teacher through the 1980s.

These early, strong and varying influences set the stage for Barnet’s long career and established his equal interest in and exploration of both representation and abstraction, each of which were dominant in different periods of Barnet’s work.

Among the major paintings included in the exhibition are Abstract, Black & White (1960); The Blue Robe (1962); The Stairway (1970); Eos (1973) and more modestly scaled recent abstract paintings from the late 2000s. Works on paper depicting the full range of his key motifs and styles are included.

In 2011 Barnet’s work was the subject of a major career retrospective, organized by Bruce Weber, at

the National Academy Museum. Weber wrote of Barnet on this occasion:

“For some eight decades, Will Barnet has made outstanding contributions to American art as a painter,

printmaker and teacher. In the course of a long, virtually unparalleled career, he has always taken a

vigorously individual route advancing to the pulse of his own aesthetic and philosophical concerns. He has

traveled that road so rarely traveled, moving fluidly between abstraction and representation. Barnet has

followed the passions of his own beliefs, even when this has not only meant going against the grain of

prevailing movements in American art, but even contrary to the directions by which he established his own

reputation.

Also in 2011, Barnet was awarded the National Medal of Arts in a White House ceremony by President Obama, who noted that “his nuanced and graceful depictions of family and personal scenes, for which he is best known, are meticulously constructed of flat planes the reveal a lifelong exploration of abstraction, expressionism and geometry.”

 

 

The Alexandre Gallery is located at 41 East 57th Street, 13th Floor, in the Fuller Building. Regular gallery hours are Tuesdays through Fridays from 10 to 5:30, and Saturdays from 11 to 5. The exhibit is on until January 10, 2015. (www.alexandregallery.com).

 

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