PROFILE-April 2009
by Suzette McAvoy

The timeless art of an American master

…like Poussin, I would like to put reason in the grass and tears in the sky
—Paul Cezanne

Standing on a high bluff overlooking the sea, artist Will Barnet fell in love with Maine on his first visit to the state more than fifty years ago; it is a love affair that has not diminished with time.

Nearly every summer since, the 98-year-old artist and his wife Elena have returned to the Maine coast, first to Chamberlain on the Pemaquid peninsula, where they had a home for many years, and more recently to Rock Gardens Inn, a group of charming historic cottages in Sebasco Estates, which is owned by their daughter Ona.

Barnet’s attraction to Maine was immediate and lasting. The artist vividly recounts his first visit as if it occurred yesterday; he and Elena had just spent part of the summer in Italy, and memories of the dramatic scenery along Almafi Drive were fresh in his mind as he looked down at the Maine coastline. What he saw was “just as exciting” as the landscapes of Italy, and he vowed to create work about Maine that captured “this sense of feeling about nature and the beauty and excitement that goes with it.”

Having recently been in Rome, Barnet was thinking of the Roman landscapes of the seventeenth-century French master Nicolas Poussin, whom he greatly admires. “I wanted my Maine paintings to relate to Poussin’s journey into Rome, to dovetail Poussin’s,” he says, “and to contain the same spiritual quality.”

Over the next decade and a half, Barnet worked almost exclusively with Maine as his subject, creating the finished pieces in his New York City studio, located in the National Arts Club near Gramercy Park, based on hundreds of drawings completed on-site. “Drawing is extremely important to me,” says the artist, “it is my medium for developing an idea.” Through a series of drawings, Barnet moves from an initial rough sketch to the abstract organization of forms and a fuller realization of mood, before settling into his final refinements. To work out colors he will occasionally add a watercolor study as well.

“My palette changed when I came to Maine and began to devote my energies and ideas to it,” he says. His previous Mediterranean colors shifted to a cooler northern palette that reflected the quality of light that he encountered. “Maine is special—even when it is a bright summer day the quality of light here is different.”

To capture the unique character of Maine light, Barnet builds up his skies with successive layers of paint, beginning with rich warm hues underneath that gradually shift to gray-blues on top. In works such as Seagull, this process also gives added weight to the color of the sky, balancing it against the heaviness of the ocean.

Balance is extremely important in Barnet’s compositions, which display a sense of poise and harmony that betray his admiration for classically conceived structure. Nothing in his work is left to chance—every element is considered in relation to every other. Yet so consummate is Barnet’s skill that his work never appears labored—it seems effortless and timeless, existing, as Ira Goldberg has written, “in a world of metaphor.”

The timeless nature of Barnet’s work is particularly evident in his Woman and the Sea series, a large body of work begun in the 1970s that was inspired by seeing his wife Elena standing on the porch of their Chamberlain home one evening, gazing out to sea. The sight prompted Barnet, who grew up in the seafaring town of Beverly, Massachusetts, to recall the many women who have scanned the horizon throughout time for signs of a loved one returning from the sea.

Now well into his tenth decade, Will Barnet has had one of the longest and most distinguished careers in American art. His works are in some 200 museums around the world, and he has been the subject of more than eighty solo exhibitions. A highly respected teacher, Barnet taught for more than forty years at the Art Students League in New York City, as well as at other institutions, including Cooper Union, Cornell University, Yale University, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

He has always pursued a uniquely personal vision, independent of the vagaries of mainstream contemporary art. His work is shaped by his keen awareness of the art of our time, a devotion to humanity, and an appreciation for the art of native cultures and the classical principles of order and harmony.

Still actively working both in Maine and New York City, in his newest work Barnet builds on his Indian Space abstractions of the 1950s. “Now I’m working with abstract ideas again, but differently, much more playful and open. Instead of the forms edging in on one another in a monumental way, the forms are opening up—they’re much more musical,” says the artist.

On the day we spoke, Barnet had just finished critiquing the work of a former student who had brought by some recent paintings for him to see. Ever the teacher and generous in his support of other artists, Barnet enthusiastically praised the work of the younger artist before moving on to discuss his own work.

Last summer, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the art of Maine and America, the Farnsworth Art Museum awarded Barnet their annual Maine in America award. That same year, on the occasion of his 97th birthday, he was honored by the New York Artists Equity Association as part of its sixtieth-anniversary celebrations.

When asked recently how he would like to be remembered, the artist didn’t hesitate in his reply: “To create timeless art has always been my great ambition, to add another chapter to what came before, another notch in the history of painting.”