Will Barnet (1911-2012) was an American painter, printmaker, and teacher whose remarkable career spanned nearly eight decades and encompassed several major movements in twentieth-century American art. Born on May 25, 1911 in Beverly, Massachusetts, he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before moving to New York, where he continued his training at the Art Students League under Stuart Davis. He would remain closely associated with the League as one of its most beloved instructors for more than seventy years, teaching generations of American artists including Cy Twombly, Eva Hesse, James Rosenquist, and Mark Rothko.

Barnet's own artistic development moved through several distinct phases. His early work engaged with the Social Realism and Depression-era subjects that defined much of American art in the 1930s, and he produced a substantial body of prints and paintings for the WPA. In the 1940s and 1950s he became a central figure in what came to be called Indian Space Painting, an approach that combined abstraction with the flattened compositional structures of pre-Columbian and Native American art. From the 1960s onward, he developed the distinctive figurative style for which he is best remembered: elegant, simplified compositions of women, family members, and cats, rendered in flat planes of color and refined line that gave his pictures a quiet, almost iconic stillness.

What is most impressive about Will Barnet as an artist was his refusal to compromise and to go with the flow. He steadfastly refused to imitate the trendsetting movements of the moment and instead chose to chart his own course. What is most remarkable, however, is that Barnet survived and perhaps flourished in spite of, and most likely because of, his resoluteness. He held over eighty solo exhibitions during his lifetime, and his works are represented in such notable museums as the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Barnet was also one of the most technically accomplished American printmakers of his generation. In 2011, at the age of one hundred, he received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. He died on November 13, 2012 at the age of 101, remembered as one of the most respected and generous figures in American art.

Will Barnet once said:

I like freshness, I don’t want to repeat myself, that is the one thing I avoid…I develop an idea and then I move on.

I didn’t compromise, ever…The old masters are still alive after 400 years, and that’s what I want to be.”