Will Barnet married the artist Mary Sinclair in 1934. They had three sons, Peter, Richard, and Todd. The boys spent a great deal of time with their father, creating art on the living room rug or the studio floor. “Will was there to set an excellent example for us three boys growing up,” says his son Todd, now a lawyer and a law professor at Pace University. At the age of eight at Robert Blackburn printmaking workshop, Todd recalls creating an original art print of his own, with his father providing guidance and direction in the joint project. One of Todd’s fondest childhood memories is of his dad pushing him around in a wheel barrow.

His brother Peter, a painter and professor of fine arts at Montclair State, has vivid memories of their earliest home, a two-bedroom apartment at 106th Street and Manhattan Avenue, near the top of Central Park. It was a cramped place with one bedroom for the three boys and the second bedroom used as Will’s studio. Their parents slept on a pullout bed in the living room.  The big rug in the living room was where we played. Peter, the oldest at 72, Richard (head of the art department at the College of Mount Saint Vincent and a teacher at The Art Students League) who is 70, and Todd, now 68, would watch Will create his art. “Will painted in front of us,” Peter explains. “He got right down on the floor. In the 1980s, many of Will’s paintings were done from a child’s eyes point-of-view.

Since Will did not have a tenured teaching job, he pasted together different jobs. In the late 1940s, he worked at Cooper Union and he always worked at the Art Students League where he moved from assistant printer to printer. He learned printing because it was a way to make a living, Peter says. Printing meant stability.

Will was quiet but very social. Peter remembers visits from Louise Nevelson, Louise Bourgeois, Stuart Davis (who had been Will’s teacher), Romare Bearden, and Bob Blackburn, a good friend. We often would go to Bob Blackburn’s studio or the Art Students League and watch Will. We would go to the Thalia Theater on 95th Street and Broadway where Will’s favorite movie was Children of Paradise. We loved Jacques Tati and we saw Alexander Nevsky and other Eisenstein movies. This, of course, was before television so movies were magical to us.” Will also took the boys to the American Museum of Natural History because he was very interested in Indians of the Northwest. Many of his late 1940s and ‘50s Indian Space paintings reflected this passion.

When the boys were older, in 1950s  Provincetown, Will was friendly with the Abstract Expressionists. “There was lots of womanizing in those days but,” says Peter, “Will would be listening to Vivaldi and keeping his own counsel.”

It was a very close family with the boys calling their parents Will and Mary and only occasionally Mom and Dad. Will worked all the time, whether at teaching or at his art work and his work ethic was apparent to his sons. “While talking on the phone, he would always be drawing,” says Peter, who has a whole envelope full of these signed drawings.

Peter attributes his father’s work ethic to what Will observed as a child since his father, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, worked for 55 years from 6 AM in the morning till the evening at the United Shoe Factory in Beverly, Mass. Although Will definitely did not want that way of life, he clearly imbibed the work ethic. “He believed in working and working hard,” Peter says.

After his divorce in the mid-1950s, Will married his second wife Elena, a dancer from Lithuania. They have one daughter, Ona Barnet. “We are friendly,” Peter says of the two families.

Peter is particularly passionate when he talks of his father’s philosophy of life. “Will never talked about investments, the stock market, or his mortgage. Even now, in his old age, he talks about the interactions of pigeons and squirrels and the light on buildings. He had a great capacity of being in the moment. Maybe that is the secret to his longevity,” Peter says. “Even today, the first thing he will talk about is the weather.”

“I once asked him if he believed in God,” Peter said, and Will replied that he only believed in nature. He told me that had he not become an artist, he would have become a gardener.

These days, Peter takes Will out every Sunday, in his wheelchair, because Will’s knees are bad. They often go to the Met where the teacher in Will comes out. “We keep meeting people there who say, ‘Oh Will, I studied with you 40 years ago.” Two years ago, at the Vermeer exhibit, we ran into Chuck Close. It was a moment,” Peter smiles, the two of them in their wheelchairs. “Chuck said Will and Will said Chuck!”

“His mind is good. He is totally articulate. His eyes are good. His hands have no tremors and he still draws beautifully and paints every day.”

Will Barnet at 100. National Academy Museum, 1089 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street. September 16 – December 31, 2011

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560 Broadway A New York Drawing Collection at Work 1991-2006, edited by Amy Eshoo, with contributions by Derrick R.Cartwright, James Cuno, Elizabeth Finch, Josef Helfenstein, Glenn D. Lowry, David Mickenberg, Ann Philbin, Earl A. Powell III, Jock Reynolds, and Townsend Wolfe.  Fifth Floor Foundation in Association with Yale University Press, 2008, ISBN 9780300135398, 200 pages, color plates

New York/New Drawings 1946 – 2007. Exhibition catalogue, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, Spain, 2009, 319 pages, color plates

A pair of handsome, substantial publications document Sally and Werner (Wynn) Kramarsky’s singular collection of American, predominantly reductive, abstract art, with its focus on works on paper. 560 Broadway celebrates the fifteen years of exhibitions at that SoHo address, gallery-office of the Fifth Floor Foundation, until 2006 when the collector moved his operation to smaller premises uptown.  As Elizabeth Finch notes in an introductory essay, Wynn Kramarsky gravitated both towards established figures within the movements that interested him, with an emphasis on Minimal and Conceptual art, and emerging or relatively neglected individuals whose work excited him and whose careers, he felt, warranted patronage: the “namies” and the “newbies” as he and his staff nicknamed the respective groups.  The book also acknowledges the Kramarskys’ proactive generosity as lenders to their artists’ shows, instigators of traveling exhibitions of the collection, and – pace the awesome fifty-odd page catalogue at the end of the book – donors of works to leading institutions.  The Vicente Museum catalogue, which accompanied an exhibition in Spring 2009, contains a transcript of the riveting, insightful, often raucous interview with Kramarsky conducted by poet William Corbett at the CUE Foundation in 2008 in which his background, character and collecting philosophy are all probed.  The catalogue pairs plates with texts by 27 artists in thecollection plus Corbett, including, for instance, Joel Shapiro on Trisha Brown, Terry Winters on Barnett Newman, Jill Baroff on Esteban Vicente himself (a 1951 collage), and Joan Waltemath on Frank Stella.  Among the blue chip Minimal and reductive artists in this balanced selection is a very healthy contingent of “newbies,” many of whom are by now on their way to being “namies” thanks in part to Kramarsky patronage.

SCULPTURE

Tim Scott. Exhibition Catalogue, David Moos and Ken Carpenter,  with foreword by David Mirvish. DM Books, Toronto, 2008,ISBN 9780969075912, 128 pages, color plates

Arthur Carter Sculptures, Paintings, and Drawings, by Charles A. Riley and Peter W. Kaplan.  Abrams, New York, 2009, ISBN 9780810905955, 207 pages, color plates- $50.00

Tim Scott’s catalogue marks two exhibitions and celebrates the restoration of an early work.  Collector David Mirvish, who used to run the commercial gallery that bore his name in Toronto from 1963-75, has a deep commitment to abstract art (Color Field painting, formalist sculpture, etc.) of the period in which he was active as a dealer.  He already owned sculptures by Briton Tim Scott from 1972 and 1983 but had missed the opportunity to acquire something from the artist’s first period, when Scott worked in synthetic materials and correspondingly assertive colors. This was an art historical moment, as Mirvish deftly describes it, in his foreword here, when “the optimism that pervaded the Art World once more supercharged the dialogue between painting and sculpture.”  Then a couple of years ago he was offered – from a museum – a large multi-part construction from 1967 titled Sestina that had been in storage since it was first shown and required extensive “refurbishment.”  Mirvish invited Scott toToronto to complete the restoration, during which time the artist also moved forward on a body of work in clay, a material he had begun experimenting with in the 1990s, producing a series of model house constructions of “intimacy and monumentality.”  Mirvish borrowed various works from the 1960s to exhibit alongside his own holdings, including Sestina, in a rented warehouse in the outskirts of Toronto, while Corkin Gallery, elsewhere in the city, presented the House of Clay series.

If Kramarsky (above) and Mirvish, in their respective ways, demonstrate the creativity of a collector’s interaction with art and artists, Arthur Carter takes that dynamic one stage further, by actually making art.  As this lavish monograph recounts, the Wall Street tycoon turned publishing mogul (he is the former proprietor of the New York Observer and now a board member of the Nation) is also the author of a substantial body of linear metal sculpture.  Like Scott, Carter is indebted to the innovations of David Smith and Anthony Caro, but he equally looks further back to the traditions of Calder, Russian Constructivism and (especially in his works on paper) De Stijl.  There is a striking affinity with Alexander Liberman, a fellowstraddler of the divide between publisher and maker.

SKETCHBOOKS

David Reed, Rock Paper Scissors. Edited by Jochen Kienbaum, Iris Maczollek, and Anke Schmidt, Snoeck, 2009, ISBN 9783940953018, 79 pages, color plates

Will Barnet A Sketchbook 1932 – 1934.  Essay by Robert C. Morgan, Foreword by Will Barnet. George Braziller Publishers, 2009, ISBN 9780807615980, 90 pages, color plates – $49.95

American Dream Drawings from a Rough Childhood by Chuck Bowdish.  Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, 2009, ISBN9780615276366, copy number 248, 40 pages, plates

Sketchbooks can be endoscopes for the artist’s mind.  Here are three books of very different artists that present, in facsimile, working papers or portfolios that offer insight into early thoughts, in terms either of career or a body of work.  From the German publishers, Snoeck, a gorgeously printed set of working drawings by David Reed exposes the meticulous planning of his slick, photo-like and complicatedly layered abstract paintings.  Actually, the drawings could better be said to chronicle than to plan: each page, on graph paper, deconstructs the evolution of the image almost diaristically, with adjacent color studies or compositional diagrams.  There is an interview with the artist conducted by collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel and by independent curator Dean Daderko.  Nonagenarian artist Will Barnet’s sketchbook from 1932-34, from Braziller, make Depression-era Central Park the young artist’s life room, as Robert Morgan recounts in his warm-hearted introduction.  The drawings are robust, tender, insightful and shot through with humor.  Though the title of Chuck Bowdish’s artist book relates to childhood, the drawings, in a classical-naïve pen and ink, arepresentation works juxtaposed with indicative and inspirational texts, in the artist’s childish block letters, from the era of Eisenhower-Kennedy, evoking a tension and distress contrastively absent from Barnet’s Depression-era idyll.

MONOGRAPHS

Alan Gussow: A Painter’s Nature, by Martica Sawin, preface by John Driscoll and recollection by James Kiberd.  Hudson Hills Press, 2009, ISBN 978I555953089, 378 pages, color plates- $70.00

Terry Setch, by Martin Holman, with contributions by Michael Sandle and Paul Greenhalgh, Lund Humphries in association withBroken Glass, 2009, ISBN 9781848221232, 160 pages, color plates

Graham Crowley, by Martin Holman Lund Humphries in association with Broken Glass, 2009, ISBN 9781848220249, 123 pages, color plates

If you own this mammoth, no holds barred book on Alan Gussow and you organize your monographs alphabetically and by nationality it will probably end up next to a smaller, more modest tome on Philip Guston (nothing as grand on Guston is in print) and that will make you wonder whether the invisible hand of the book market is doing its job properly in apportioning effort and resources to the subjects who deserve them. A bias towards Gussow’s later work bears the heavy-handed hallmark of estate/gallery sponsorship.  That said, Martica Sawin does a thorough, indeed loving job of research into the artist’s life, passions and devlelopment, drawing extensively on his archives (he died in 1997.) Her text is truly fascinating when describing Gussow’s environment activism. His style evolved (or devolved, if viewed art historically) from hard-edged abstraction via abstract expressionism to a familiar American fusion of the abstract and the perceptual, with strong shades of Milton Avery and Charles Burchfield and occasional hints of Louis Finkelstein.  Wherever the influences and affinities lie, the art never feels like it achieves modernist rigor: rich, resolved, sincere, always, but somehow more a product than an inquiry.

Two perceptive, thorough monographs on mid-career British artists Terry Setch and Graham Crowley from author Martin Holman are published by Lund Humphries in association with Broken Glass, a firm that specializes in books put together by their artist subjects. Both artists have substantial reputations in Britain and elsewhere in Europe though they will likely not be known to American readers.  Crowley, until recently Professor of Painting at London’s Royal College of Art, one of the most prestigious academic positions in the UK, has been stylistically eclectic, varying from fantasy realism via a transavanguardia classicism to, in the newest work, an intriguing pop landscape idiom.  What is consistent, however, is a gritty, urban toughness to his images, even when at the same time there is an almost Blakean visionary quality to them.  Setch has a sensibility arguably both more experiment and more romantic than Crowley’s.  His work has been “out there” in scale and materials, working for instance with detritus to create poignant landscapes almost polemically imbued with environmental foreboding.

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“Mari Lyons: Mostly Broadway at 80th Street” at First Street Gallery until November 29 (526 W. 26th Street Suite 915, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 646 336 8053)

“Elizabeth O’Reilly” at George Billis Gallery until November 29 (511 W.25th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212 645 2621)

The Will Barnet exhibition closing this holiday weekend at Alexandre observes the spirit of Thanksgiving. Consisting of four paintings of the 1960s and a cache of supporting drawings, this gem of a show, at once elegant and scholarly, has abstraction and representation share a feast of equals.

Nowadays the once virulent opposition, abstraction versus representation, really is as an old chestnut. The very act of painting has been isolated in such a fashion as to thrust rival camps into comradeship, rather like Tsarists and Mensheviks sharing a common exile. Furthermore, enough contemporaries bridge the divide between the two idioms, like Gerhard Richter with his hyperrealism and his painterly abstraction, to make the dichotomy redundant.

But Mr. Barnet, who is ninety two and going strong, is of a different vintage: like Richard Diebenkorn or Philip Guston, his shifting back and forth between paradigms is almost a defining aspect of his career.

The pattern for these artists was to start realist, then discover abstraction, and thence to and from between syntheses of the two. Mr. Barnet is now, in fact, revisiting his (for him) purist abstraction of the post-war period in reworkings of old compositions. Like Guston, his second volte face (the readmission of depictive content during the heyday of formal abstraction) was met with incredulity and vitriol.

Which seems bizarre, looking at Mr. Barnet’s works of that decade, so well behaved are representation and non-objectivity in each other’s company. All four paintings here are tightly composed, coolly executed, gentle on the senses, and lyrical in the interplay of shapes. The non-representational pair are themselves politely poised between constructivism and organic abstraction. The figural works, highly stylized mother-child groupings, find their tenderness equally in humane content (they feature the artist’s wife and daughter) and unabrasive shape coordination.

These portraits acknowledge Matisse, but without any hint of that master’s angst. They also look rather like de-sexualized Balthus’s, sharing his sweetened orientalism, and there is more than a hint of Milton Avery, though without the latter’s energetic primitivism. The overriding qualities in Mr. Barnet are always softness and charm- hardly characteristics to guarantee a modernist his place in the pantheon. But these paintings that so unabashed about what they are and represent they seem likely somehow to survive on their own terms.

Interestingly, from the point of view of current credibility, form consciousness is more acute and sophisticated in the figural works than the abstract ones. It is as if human content proved a decoy rather than a distraction. When left to dominate, the abstract objects became obsessed with their own identity. Precisely because the portraits are so upfront in their decorative stylization and shameless in their sentiment, they are less like period pieces than the abstract paintings.

If Mr. Barnet puts you in the mood for soft modernism then two other shows closing this weekend will warrant attention. Mari Lyons is having her ninth show at the First Street Gallery, the most consistently energetic of the several veteran artist cooperatives that have migrated to Chelsea. Her Upper Westside street scenes betray her tutelage under Max Beckmann in their vertiginous exuberance and their vibrant plasticity. They can also put you in mind of Red Grooms in their Breughelesque social density. Her expressive naivity (outsized automobiles, expressive street lettering) genuinely seems unforced. Dashing colors and deft little figures ensure that these paintings are real charmers.

Elizabeth O’Reilly brings a similar sunny disposition to bear on decidedly less metropolitan townscapes. Her topography stretches from country lanes in her native Ireland to wastelands along American rivers. Ms. O’Reilly wears her mentors on her sleeve, and luckily they are good ones: Lois Dodd when it comes to smart but unflashy composition and George Nick (or it could be Mr. Nick’s own mentor, Albert Marquet) for lyrical color and fluent application. Ms. O’Reilly’s quiet, fresh unpretentious paintings have more going on in them than might seem obvious to the quickly satisfied gaze, particularly in shadow-play. The collective shadow of anthropomorphized houses along the sinous street in “Ballydehob, County Cork,” 2003, for instance, is a ready-made abstract shape as quirky and autonomous as the pulsating jigsaw pieces found in Will Barnet.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, November 28, 2003

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