May 25, 1911

Will Barnet (May 25, 1911 to November 13, 2012) was an American painter who was born in Beverly, Massachusetts and died in New York City. According to his Washington Post obit, paintings such as the one below represent the phase in his artistic career that succeeded his abstraction years.

“He started out as a representational artist and moved into abstraction,” said Joann Moser, senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. “Then in the mid-1960s, he adopted a type of abstracted realism in which he achieved a precise balance between abstraction and representation.”

The author of his obituary, David Brown, label this last phase, a " haunted and stylized realism." We have an example:




This is Will Barnet's "Woman Reading," (1970).

In 1939 his work was included in “American Art Today” at the New York World’s Fair, according to his Times obit. While we may wonder why he had to be 100 years old before he got a National Medal of Arts , in fact, critics and his fellow artists had not underrated this genius.