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| Idle Hands, 1935 |
I love this artist - what joy and freshness, what an evident and delighted response he made to other artists, and what charming results came from it - I suppose critics would ding him for "platforming", or "scaffolding", working on the seminal achievements and the germinal design, color, and style content implied in the accomplishment of other artists. But these works seem to embody such breadth and wholeness of receipt of the seminal artists' gift; this is remarkable to me, and a great accomplishment in its own right. Extension and deeper understanding of the artists themselves and of Barnet's remarkable use of them result. It's as if seminal artists' gifts include a compass of options, for the artist and viewer to journey according to his will and whimsey.
(from the NYT obit) ...Mr. Barnet started out as a Social Realist printmaker responding to the struggles of ordinary people during the Depression...... He went on to work in graphic arts for the Depression-era Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. He also made prints for the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco and the painter and political cartoonist William Gropper....
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| The Wheelbarrow, c 1935 |
Eventually his interest in Modernist formal innovations led to colorful, Picassoesque paintings depicting domestic family scenes, often featuring young children, and by the end of the 1940s his paintings had become entirely abstract. He soon fell in with a group known as the Indian Space Painters, who created geometrically complex abstract paintings using forms derived from both Native American art and modern European painting.
But Mr. Barnet returned to traditionalist representational painting in the early 1960s. Under the influences of early Renaissance painting, Japanese printmaking and, perhaps obliquely, Pop Art, he made flattened, precisely contoured portraits of the architect Frederick Kiesler, the art critic Katherine Kuh and the art collector Roy Neuberger.
... His later images of mysterious waiting women showed the influences of Pre-Raphaelite narratives, Magritte’s Surrealism and Edward Hopper’s taciturn romanticism.
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| Summer Idyll |
In 2003 Mr. Barnet again changed course, returning to abstraction and resuming the engagement with bold shapes, vivid color and dynamic compositions that characterized his painting in the 1950s.
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| The North American, c 1940, Indian Space Art movemen |
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| The Enclosure, 1963-2003 |
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| Woman and the Sea, 1972 |
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