Will Barnet, who turns 100 in May, hurt his leg in a fall some time ago and nowadays does his "walking" in a wheeled office chair.
Every month or so, his son, Peter, now 72 and head of the painting department at Montclair State University, brings Dad to the Metropolitan or another big museum and pushes him through the galleries in his wheelchair.
Of course, Barnet loves art. He was a teacher at the Art Students League for 45 years and has been a well-known painter and printmaker for over 70 years, with an encyclopedic knowledge of American art and artists.
But even at his advanced age, Barnet is more than just an enthusiast. As shown in his "Centennial Celebration" — an exhibit of 10 paintings from the past year currently on display at the Montclair Art Museum — Barnet is still bringing the canvas to life himself.
"When I have an idea I go investigate it," Barnet says under the wall-sized window of his studio at the National Arts Club, where he has lived for 35 years. "I had been casting around for an animal to replace the cats in my work, and I thought I might try crows."
He’d gone to a crow hospital, where injured crows are nursed back to health, in order to study them. "Did you know Maine crows are different from other crows? They are. They have longer legs, and more streamlined bodies."
Barnet came to New York City to be an artist in 1930, leaving his home in Beverly, Mass. at 19. He started during the throes of the Great Depression, when there were seemingly no jobs to even support an art habit on the side.
"When I started, we did not expect to sell, much less get rich," he said. "Nobody bought any paintings for 10, 20 years during the Depression. It was a commitment and a passion. Artists wanted nothing more than to get together and talk about art, to have philosophical discussions. There was an intimacy among artists that today’s artists have lost."
Social Realism was the movement of the day when Barnet began. So, like his contemporaries, he made many prints documenting poverty in the city. And printmaking became his entry to teaching at the venerable Art Students League of New York.
Among Barnet’s students and friends — some still here, many gone like the snow — are names nobody can forget now: Romare Bearden, Stuart Davis, James Rosenquist, Eva Hesse, Cy Twombly, and many others. He taught Mark Rothko printmaking, working closely with him for a year.
He became master printer in New York for José Clemente Orozco, the popular Mexican muralist.
"I thought it was very important that I become a good printmaker, because it was a job," Barnet said.
As an artist, Barnet found himself alternating between periods of abstraction and figuration.
In the 1940s, his earliest abstract period, he worked with painter Peter Busa — Norman Mailer’s roommate at the time — and several other "Indian Space" painters.
In the 1940s, his earliest abstract period, he worked with painter Peter Busa — Norman Mailer’s roommate at the time — and several other "Indian Space" painters.
These were American painters who found inspiration in the art of the Great Plains and Pacific Northwest Indiana much the way Picasso and Braque had found influence from African and New Guinean design to invent Cubism.
The sense of balance of Indian Space compositions are found in Barnet’s current paintings, though they tend to invoke relationships between larger areas of pure color.
In the 1950s, critics discovered Abstract Expressionism — the first post-war American art style to capture the popular imagination. Calling themselves the "New York School," these artists used paint much more liberally, slapping oodles of it on the surface, as a gesture.
"It went beyond the war," Barnet said. "it was the sense of freedom, of excitement, that Abstract Expressionism brought with it. The limitless possibilities we suddenly had."
Will Barnet briefly preceded his son, Peter, as an art instructor at Montclair in the mid-1940s. He taught other places, too.
"I’ve always known my dad was part of the larger art world," Peter Barnet said, "But I’ve also known that he holds himself apart, too, in his own life and art. When that crew of Abstract Expressionists arrived, who drank and smoked and womanized, that was not my dad’s world."
Will Barnet said he took up smoking Cuban cigars in the 1950s, so he’d have something in his hand instead of a drink at art parties. Unlike most Abstract Expressionists, Barnet had a family that was as much a part of his identity as his work ethic and art.
Will Barnet said he took up smoking Cuban cigars in the 1950s, so he’d have something in his hand instead of a drink at art parties. Unlike most Abstract Expressionists, Barnet had a family that was as much a part of his identity as his work ethic and art.
Barnet had three sons with his first wife, Mary Sinclair, including Todd, a law professor at Pace University; Richard, a sculptor living who teaches at Mt. St. Vincent’s College; and Peter. With his second wife, Elena, Will had a daughter, Ona, who now runs an inn in Maine.
Peter fondly remembers his dad drawing the kids at breakfast, asking them to freeze their play to hold a pose for him. He has family photos of his dad drawing in front of them. He’s on the floor, still wearing his coat and tie, with his hand moving a chunk of charcoal across the page — where a large black cat sits right on the paper.
"I think the drawings and paintings of animals — the cats, crows, chickens, spiders, and so on — are, in a way, self-portraits," said Peter, who in turn has made dogs one of his own chief subjects.
"I think he sees animals as being more direct and honest in their emotions. But it also fits in with dad’s feeling for Emily Dickinson’s poetry, something he comes by through that shared New England sensibility. The way she can observe a spider spinning a web, a very small thing, and spin it out into a vision of greater vastness and mystery — animals are like that to him."
Many of Barnet’s works have had a connection to family. One of his more poignant works was a series of paintings of a big, square New England-frame house built by his father that Barnet inherited after his last sibling, Eva, died.
The renderings of the interior, according to Barnet, were through Eva’s eyes. He imagined the shadows left by the family they’d known together. Barnet wound up donating the series to museums and universities around New England.
Barnet, who turns 100 on May 25, said you could see some of the static simplicity of 83-year-old Pop artist Alex Katz — a fellow Maine summerer — in these pictures. But Pop art itself never appealed to Barnet. Tastes are no more permanent than snowfall to him.
"Tell me what they’re saying about Pop in 40 years," he said.
"I believe it’s not art if the artist’s hand never touches the canvas. Great art always has the touch of humanity. It puts blood on the canvas."
