232
●
WILL BARNET
Play
.
Color pastels, watercolor and oil on paper, 1975. 825x650 mm; 32
1
/
2
x25
5
/
8
inches. Signed
and dated in pencil, lower right recto, and annotated throughout the margins in pencil.
Signed, titled and annotated in pencil on the back board. Ex-collection Alexandre Gallery,
NewYork, with the original label.
Barnet (1911-2012) was born in Massachusetts and studied at the School of the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston, before arriving in NewYork in 1931. He started out in a Social Realist
style and worked for the graphic arts division of theWPA, Federal Art Project in NewYork,
producing lithographs and etchings of factory workers, farm laborers and urban dwellers.
By the mid-1940s, Barnet developed an abstract style, which reached its zenith by the mid-
1950s (see lots 230 and 231). He was the key artist in a movement called Indian Space
Painting which traced its sources to semi-abstract Native American art and paralleled the
work of NewYork Abstract Expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollock,Willem de Kooning
and Robert Motherwell.
Barnet’s flirtation with abstract art waned by the early 1960s and he turned to the style for
which he is best-known today: colorful figurative work with poetic, symbolist and often
enigmatic subjects such as women at rest, women with domesticated animals like cats,
parrots, dogs and doves, and women posed in solitary, seemingly pensive and melancholic
states of waiting. His mature style, seen in works like
Play
, possesses the influence of
Renaissance painting, traditional Japanese color woodcuts and American Pop Art. Barnet
continued painting in a similar vein from the 1960s onward, for more than five decades; a
longtime resident of the National Arts Club, Gramercy Park, NewYork, Barnet died at age
101 after a prolific and successful career.
His works have entered virtually every major public collection in the United States,
including the National Gallery of Art,Washington, DC, the Metrolpolitan Museum of Art,
NewYork, theWhitney Museum of American Art, NewYork, the Museum of Modern Art,
NewYork, the the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the
Jewish Museum, New York. He has been the subject of over eighty solo exhibitions
throughout the United States.
Play
was developed into a color lithograph by Barnet in 1975, printed in an edition of
150 by American Atelier, NewYork, and published by the International Play Group, Inc.,
NewYork. However, the color lithograph differs from the current watercolor. In the print
the figure of the woman in the tree is clothed and the background is a gradated, color
rainbow pattern.
[30,000/50,000]
