JANUARY FINE ESTATES CHARLESTON SC
Lot 150:
Description
Will Barnet (1911-2012) Signed Artist proof Woodcut "The Mirror". Pencil signed, titled and numbered by the artist. A/P Mr. Barnet was born on May 25, 1911. His father, Noah, who had immigrated from Russia, was a machinist in a shoe factory. His mother, Sarahdina, came from Eastern Europe. Mr. Barnet became interested in art as a child and by age 12 had his own studio in his parents’ basement. A native of Beverly, Mass., Mr. Barnet attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and, on a scholarship, went to New York to study at the Art Students League, arriving in 1931, he once said, with $10 and a portfolio of seascapes and portraits of the family cat. He worked briefly under Stuart Davis and became acquainted with the Surrealist artist Arshile Gorky. Mr. Barnet started out as a Social Realist printmaker responding to the struggles of ordinary people during the Depression. He was "radicalized" at 19, he said, roaming the city and sketching the faces of the downtrodden while renting a room for $1 a night. Four years after joining the Art Students League he was appointed its official printer. 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 Jos? Clemente Orozco and the painter and political cartoonist William Gropper. Mr. Barnet had his first solo exhibition at the Eighth Street Playhouse in Manhattan in 1935 and, three years later, his first gallery show at the Hudson Walker Gallery, also in Manhattan. That same year he married Mary Sinclair, a painter and fellow student, with whom he had three sons. In 1939 his work was included in "American Art Today" at the New York World’s Fair. In addition to the Art Students League, Mr. Barnet taught at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art from 1945 to 1978 and, in shorter stints, at Yale, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and other schools. He was awarded a National Medal of Arts from 2011, which was presented by President Obama in a White House ceremony. It was in 2011 when the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey exhibited a selection of his canvases in honor of his centennial year. His work was also shown in many solo and group shows around the United States, including six appearances in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s annual exhibitions. He was the subject of several museum retrospectives. "Will Barnet at 100," presented at the National Academy Museum in 2011, was the last. It was also his first solo retrospective in New York. Over the course of his career Barnet exhibited extensively both in galleries and at major museums including the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Des Moines Art Center, and the Mint Museum. His works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota, the Museum of Modern Art, the University Art Museum, University of California at Berkeley, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.
Condition: good
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