contributions by Christopher Green, Gail Stavitsky, Jessica Nicoll and Ona Barnet introduction by Bruce Weber
The Artist Book Foundation, 2024 eISBN: 979-8-9872281-9-7 | Cloth: 978-1-7329864-5-9 Library of Congress Classification N6537.B22W55 2024 Dewey Decimal Classification 709.2
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC | EXCERPT
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Will Barnet’s artistic career as a painter and printmaker spanned nearly eight decades of continuous creativity. Few artists, other than perhaps Picasso or Monet, can claim such an extended period of uninterrupted and innovative art making. From the darkness of the Great Depression to the opening decade of the twenty-first century, his oeuvre reflects his unique interpretation of the art world’s evolving genres: Social Realism, Modernism, Abstract Expressionism, and ultimately representational Minimalism with the human figure as his primary subject. Barnet was devoted to making art every day and worked diligently even at the very end of his life. “The Old Masters are still alive after 400 years, and that’s what I want to be,” he once said. “At the age of 10 or 12, I discovered that being an artist would give me an ability to create something which would live on after death.” Live on it does; in addition to his acclaimed body of work, he influenced a broad spectrum of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, James Rosenquist, Cy Twombly, and Ethel Fisher, and he held teaching positions at the Cooper Union, Yale University, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Barnet’s works can be found in nearly every major public collection in the United States, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Art. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the first Artist’s Lifetime Achievement Award Medal given on the occasion of the National Academy of Design’s 175th anniversary. He was also awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama in 2011. The Artist Book Foundation is delighted and honored to announce the upcoming publication of Will Barnet, the first comprehensive monograph on the artist in nearly 40 years. With scholarly essays by the four distinguished authors, an extensive plate section, a comprehensive chronology, lists of awards and exhibitions, as well as a detailed bibliography, this monograph will be a thorough presentation of Barnet’s iconic images and consistently evolving style while celebrating his unquenchable joie de vivre.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Bruce Weber was senior curator at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts. His specialty is in American painting, sculpture, and drawings from the late-eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Gail Stavitsky is Chief Curator at the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, NJ, specializing in American Modernism. She has written extensively on art and her titles include Will Barnet: A Timeless World. Christopher Green studies modern and contemporary art, specializing in Native American Art of the twentieth century. He currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College. Jessica Nicoll is director and Louise Ines Doyle chief curator of the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. She also serves as the director of Smith’s Museum Concentration, advising and instructing students in museum history, theory, and practice. Ona Barnet is the artist’s daughter. She is the director of the Will Barnet foundation.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Beginnings: Will Barnet’s Beverly Years 7 BRUCE WEBER My Dad 23 ONA BARNET Will Barnet: Artist and Teacher 27 GAIL STAVITSKY Will Barnet: Indigenous Influences 41 CHRISTOPHER T. GREEN Will Barnet’s New England Mythos 63 JESSICA NICOLL Plates 81 Will Barnet 139 WILLIAM MEEK Acknowledgments 141 Chronology 143 Exhibitions 149 Awards 166 Selected Public Collections 167 Bibliography 169
EXCERPT
"As the son of working-class Slovakian immigrants, Daniel Hodermarsky’s navigation of social contexts—from corporate settings to educational institutions to the art world—was shaped by his identity as a blue-collar, second-generation American. While aspects of Hodermarsky’s identity enabled him to achieve professional stability and, to some degree, be assimilated into predominantly white elite environments, his ethnic and socioeconomic background simultaneously cast him as “other.” The complexities embedded in his life experience endowed him with an acute sensitivity to societal behaviors and structures that he deployed as an artistic tool, and the time he spent on the front lines during World War II only augmented his empathetic disposition. In 1975, nearly fifteen years before Deerfield Academy transitioned from an all-boys student body to a coeducational academy, Hodermarsky, who had recently become the founding chair of the art department, wrote a letter to the school’s newspaper addressing troubling behavior on the part of a few male students. One had abandoned his date at a social affair while another had mocked a fellow student for his homosexuality. Hodermarsky’s letter is an incisive social commentary on sexism, bigotry, and “manliness” that, according to him, should not be measured by one’s sexuality or physical strength but by one’s character. The letter ends with an appeal: “Your humanity is the most important function in life. Nurture it. Be a human being.”