A Thanksgiving Offering: The Will Barnet Exhibit at the George Segal Gallery

"A transformation of the everyday into the majestic."—Will Barnet.

"My father won't be fully happy until the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounts a full scale retrospective of his work." Artist and 40 year veteran art professor at Montclair State University, Peter Barnet, is talking about American master artist Will Barnet, who continues to paint and have exhibits at age 99 plus.

I won't be fully happy until I see that retrospective either. Or at least one at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where past retrospectives of Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko and, recently, Charles Burchfield, changed how I viewed their work and the  world.

What we do have is here in Montclair: A beautifully designed gem of a Will Barnet retrospective at the wonderful George Segal Gallery at Montclair State University. The 41 works on view there through Dec. 11 cover Will Barnet's figurative work from 1934-2000. The exhibit was sensitively curated by MSU professors Peter Barnet and Anne Betty Weinshenker, Montclair Art Museum Chief Curator and Barnet authority Gail Stavitsky, and George Segal Gallery Director M.Teresa Rodriguez. Designer Anthony Louis Rodriguez (no relation) of the gallery has beautifully mounted the show into a series of often intimate grouping of related works.

Barnet's working career has overlapped with the careers of the Whitney honored artists. Like Hopper and Rothko, Barnet is a master of a sublime light, see "Salem," oil on canvas in the show from 1983. Like Burchfield, he is deeply attuned to nature, often nature as embodied in the animal world.

Barnet's study of art started young and solitary. He poured through reproductions of Daumier, Ingres, and other classicists at his local Beverly, MA library and developed the extraordinary draftsmanship underlying all his work. Soon he had scholarships to the Boston Museum School of Art and then at the Art Students League of New  York. He arrived there at the start of the Great Depression and remained as a beloved master teacher for nearly 40 years. He also largely taught himself lithography. By the end of the 1930s, he was supporting his family through art sales, his teaching, and as perhaps the nation's premiere lithographer.

Barnet learned and absorbed from the masters and, famously, from Asian and Native American art, but early on he found his own voice. He has worked in many styles—many are represented in this exhibit. All are united by the integrity of his vision, the subtlety of his light, the brilliance of his composition, and the mastery of his draftsmanship.

Barnet is an artist of essences and an artist of both deep intellectual and emotional reserves. As son Peter explains, "Dad's work is like Vermeer's; a woman pouring water becomes all women pouring water." In Barnet's work, the universals are often women—women waiting, women with cats, women with child.

This exhibit reveals the working artist. The many and powerful preparatory drawings and studies, especially of the New England women waiting for their seagoing husbands' returns, confirm the long process behind his finished works. He is a prolific artist; he continues to paint for many hours every day, as he has done all his life. But as Mr. Barnet disclosed to me in a recent conversation, it can be many years from first conception to his sending the final work into the world.

Many of my artist friends have viewed and loved this exhibit. We each have our favorites. Here are mine:

First, are two works from 1971: An etching in aquatint ,"Women, Cat and String," which embodies Will's integration of Asian, Native American, and classical art into his vision. Also, there is "Woman and White Cat," a serigraph pictured here. The latter shows Barnet's  mastery of the silk screen and his brilliant composition across the entire picture plane. The interplay—watch the eyes—between the woman and the cat delves the mystery of our connection with that most mysterious of animals.

"Peter," his 1945 oil of his eldest son, then about age 6, contains Will's love of family, deep respect for children and, as always, gorgeous color sense. Peter, robed and with books, looks the young philosopher-king. Note his hands.

Will Barnet's studies for his "Atlantis" and "Women of the Sea" series plunge right into your heart.

If you don't know Will Barnet's work, you should. If you don't think of yourself as someone who looks at art, please think again. Barnet's work is beautiful, profound and, by design, accessible. You don't have to know art history or art criticism. Each canvas, print, or drawing presents all you really need to know.

The exhibit "Will Barnet" runs through December 11 at the George Segal Gallery, MSU, 1 Normal Ave., Montclair. Park in the Red Hawk parking deck and take the elevator to the fourth floor entrance. See montclair.edu/segalgallery for more information.

Read A Conversation With Artist Will Barnet—An American Master on Montclair Patch.