Diverse styles and a thorough mastery of drawing, painting, and printmaking distinguish the eighty-plus-year career of Will Barnet. Born to immigrant parents in Beverly, Massachusetts, Barnet was still a child when he set up his first studio in the basement of the family home. His formal training began in 1927, when he entered the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A few years later, Barnet enrolled in the Art Students League of New York, distinguishing himself not only as a painter but as a printmaker in the Socialist Realist vein. During the 1930s and 1940s, the artist won a number of printmaking prizes in addition to serving as instructor of graphic arts at the Art Students League, the War Veterans Art Center of the Museum of Modern Art, and the Cooper Union, all in New York.

After the birth of his first child in 1938, Barnet focused almost exclusively on images of his family. Children became a predominant theme, inspiring many of the expressive, form-based compositions that presaged the artist's transition to abstraction in the 1950s. Native American art of the Northwest became a strong influence during this period, and together with several other painters, Barnet formulated the concept of "Indian Space" to describe their colorful abstract style. By the 1960s, however, the artist returned to a more naturalistic mode, creating numerous images of friends and family members as well as allegorical compositions featuring young women, cats, and birds. Characterized by flatness, monumentality, and lyrical color, these images have become synonymous with the artist's later career.

Awakening is an important transitional work. The painting is perhaps Barnet's first fully realized abstract composition, incorporating the flat rectangular forms, bright color, and Northwestern tribal motifs that distinguish his mature "Indian Space" canvases of the 1950s. Like his earlier, more representational work, the subject of Awakening is the artist's family. Barnet's wife, Mary, occupies a prominent place in the center of the composition; at her feet are the family cat and the artist's youngest son, Todd. Flanking their mother on the left and right are the two older boys, Peter and Richard. One holds a baseball and fielder's glove; the other appears to be blowing bubble gum. In contrast to the symbolic and tragic themes favored by many Abstract Expressionists during the 1940s and 1950s, Barnet looks to familiar experience, turning to the people closest to him to develop a meaningfully expressive style.

In Awakening, Barnet utilizes a formal vocabulary that respects the nature of painting while remaining both descriptive and emotive. Breaking down figures and surrounding space into a series of flat rectangular forms, the artist acknowledges the plane of the canvas and the independence of paint per se. At the same time, however, Barnet's arrangements resolve into recognizable imagery of people, animals, and interior details. Bright color and strong contrasts complement the spare quality of the forms, lending the overall composition a mysterious and lyrical aura that speaks directly to the viewer's sensibility.

The compartmentalized forms and totemic figuration of Awakening mark Barnet's mature assimilation of Northwestern tribal art. As a child, Barnet was fascinated by American Indian work, and as an adult, he studied it carefully. In early works such as Awakening, the Northwestern referents are relatively clear: rounded lozenges and colored borders as well as the particular rendering of eyes, ears, and other details all have counterparts in the figural imagery of the Haida, Tlingit, and other tribes. Barnet's later "Indian Space" paintings are more abstract in nature and reflect the artist's continuing experimentation with form and representation.

Awakening was presented to the Currier Museum of Art by Will and Elena Barnet in 1986.

VSD

REFERENCES

Robert Doty. Will Barnet. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984.

Johanna Garfield. "Will Barnet and the Family." American Art 9, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 110-115.