"Play (1974)" Vintage Offset Lithograph After Will Barnet (SOLD)

Vintage offset lithograph from the book "27 Master Prints" published in 1979. The print comes hinge mounted on archival matboard. Excellent condition!

Will Barnet (1911 – 2012)

Will Barnet decided early in his life to be an artist. As a boy growing up in Beverly, Massachusetts he spent hours sketching and poring over art books at the local library. The cellar in his family home became his first studio. After studying at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Barnet left for the Art Students League in New York in 1930 and concentrated on lithography. He taught and produced art in New York for more than sixty years, spending summers in Maine from the mid-1950s.

Barnet's works focus primarily on the human figure. The family, especially his own, has been an enduring subject for him. His images are not descriptions of individuals, but careful arrangements of forms that express moods and feelings. Barnet balances shapes to create strong, interlocking compositions, as is evident in his many prints.

He is probably best known for these enigmatic portraits of family, made from the 1970s onwards, notably the Silent Seasons series, which contrasts his earlier works edginess and brooding contemplation that becomes more remarkable when compared with the more placid and pretty works which followed his second marriage. Within his oeuvre one can chart the evolution of American painting trends of which Will was on the forefront, as well as the joys and vicissitudes of his personal life, with his first marriage ending in divorce and his second marriage providing a more stable family life, reflected in the harmonious compositions of domestic tranquility of his later work.