Will Barnet (1911-2012)

Dowling Walsh Gallery is pleased to present "Will Barnet: Correspondence," an exhibition of the renowned artist's lesser-known abstract works. The exhibition will be on view in the gallery's newly renovated building at 357 Main Street in Rockland from July 5 to July 26, 2025, with a public reception scheduled for Friday, July 11, from 4:00 to 6:00 pm.

Widely known and internationally respected as a figurative painter and printmaker, Will Barnet (1911-2012), worked abstractly in the early and late decades of his career. The exhibition, “Will Barnet: Correspondence,” brings together a selection of the artist's intimate, abstract works on paper from the 1950s, many of which were created on envelopes and postcards, with richly colored and imagined abstract paintings made in the years leading up to his death at the age of 101 in 2012. As Christopher B. Crosman writes in the exhibition catalog, "Barnet liked clarity, concision, and balance—correspondences, if you will, that could carry both representation and abstraction."

A native of Beverly, Massachusetts, Barnet had one of the longest and most distinguished careers in American art. His work is in the collections of over 200 museums worldwide and 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 first visited Maine in the late 1950s and returned nearly every summer after. First to Chamberlain on the Pemaquid Peninsula and later to Rock Gardens Inn, a group of charming historic cottages in Sebasco Estates, then owned by his daughter Ona. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he 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."

In the final decade of his life, Barnet revisited ideas he was exploring in his abstract work from the 1950s. "Now I'm working with abstract ideas again, but differently," he said in an interview in 2009, "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."

Reviewing an exhibition of the artist's late abstract paintings in 2010, NYTimes art critic Roberta Smith wrote, "This just in: At the imposing age of 99, the accomplished American painter Will Barnet has returned to abstraction, with excellent results…the paintings themselves are remarkably fresh in every way: the loosely locked-in compositions, stroke-by-stroke layering of colors and balance of restraint and flair. Mr. Barnet offers inspiring proof that it is never too late to sprout new leaves on painting, a tree that accommodates perpetual growth and renewal."

Correspondence

July 2025

Selected Works

Press Release