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2 books match the query 'Barnet, Will'

cover of My Father's House: On Will Barnet's Painting

My Father's House

On Will Barnet's Painting

Thomas Dumm

Duke University Press, 2014

In My Father's House, the political philosopher Thomas Dumm explores a series of stark and melancholy paintings by the American artist Will Barnet. Responding to the physical and mental decline of his sister Eva, who lived alone in the family home in Beverly, Massachusetts, Barnet began work in 1990 on what became a series of nine paintings depicting Eva and other family members, as they once were and as they figured in the artist's memory. Rendered in Barnet's signature quiet, abstract style, the paintings, each featured in full color, present the ordinary and extraordinary aspects of a twentieth-century American family.
 
Dumm first became acquainted with Barnet and his paintings in 2008. Given his scholarly focus on the lives of ordinary people, he was immediately attracted to the artist's work. When they met, Dumm and Barnet began a friendship and dialogue that lasted until the painter's death in 2012, at the age of 101. This book reflects the many discussions the two had concerning the series of paintings, Barnet's family, his early life in Beverly, and his eighty-year career as a prominent New York artist. Reading the almost gothic paintings in conversation with the writers and thinkers key to both his and Barnet's thinking—Emerson, Spinoza, Dickinson, Benjamin, Cavell, Nietzsche, Melville—Dumm's haunting meditations evoke broader reflections on family, mortality, the uncanny, and the loss that comes with remembrance.
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cover of Will Barnet

Will Barnet

Will Barnet

The Artist Book Foundation, 2024

The first monograph on Will Barnet in nearly 40 years, this title reflect's the artist's unique interpretation of the world's evolving genres.

Will Barnet’s artistic career as a painter and printmaker spanned nearly eight decades of continuous creativity. Few artists, other than perhaps Picasso or Monet, can claim such an extended period of uninterrupted and innovative art making. From the darkness of the Great Depression to the opening decade of the twenty-first century, his oeuvre reflects his unique interpretation of the art world’s evolving genres: Social Realism, Modernism, Abstract Expressionism, and ultimately representational Minimalism with the human figure as his primary subject.

This book is the first comprehensive monograph on Will Barnet in nearly 40 years. With scholarly essays by the four distinguished authors, an extensive plate section, a comprehensive chronology, lists of awards and exhibitions, and a detailed bibliography, this monograph is a thorough presentation of Barnet's iconic images and consistently evolving style while celebrating his unquenchable joie de vivre.

Barnet was devoted to making art every day and worked diligently even at the very end of his life. "The Old Masters are still alive after 400 years, and that's what I want to be," he once said. "At the age of 10 or 12, I discovered that being an artist would give me an ability to create something which would live on after death." Live on it does; in addition to his acclaimed body of work, he influenced a broad spectrum of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, James Rosenquist, Cy Twombly, and Ethel Fisher.

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