Timeless forms

Will Barnet at the Portland Museum of Art

By Jenna Russell

“Will Barnet: A Timeless World,” shows at the Portland Museum of Art through February 18.

“RUTH BOWAN”: Will Barnett, 1967, oil on canvas.

Will Barnet’s century-spanning painting career — now being featured at the Portland Museum of Art — has spectacular range and pitch, from the poised abstractions of the 1950s, influenced by Hopi ceramics, to the cool and formal modern portraits that reference Vermeer in the vernacular of Alex Katz. This well-organized exhibition doesn’t try to sort through the decades and nominate the 89-year-old Barnet as this or that sort of painter; rather, it’s a celebration of his endless invention, in which it’s easy to trace the essential Barnet-ness that repeats like genetic code in his visions through the years.

If you haven’t heard of Barnet, you aren’t alone. Born in Beverly, on Boston’s North Shore, in 1911, he studied art at Boston’s Museum School before heading to New York, where he was a fixture at the famous Art Students League in the 1930s. He taught for 20 years at Cooper Union, and for more than 20 years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and while he has been friend or teacher to many better-known names in American art, Barnet’s own contributions have been somewhat neglected by critics and historians. In Maine, where he has spent summers, this seems to be his year, with a second show of his work currently at the O’Farrell Gallery in Brunswick.

In the Portland show, start with the charcoal “Lifestudy” (1929), near the second-floor elevator doors, to understand at once what Barnet is about. Executed when he was still in his 20s, a student at the Museum School, the figure drawing is the work of a natural superstar, the kind of born artist who might have skipped art school altogether. It’s Barnet’s inherent understanding of the human figure that allows him to undertake the later experiments hanging nearby: portraits of his children in a primitive, childlike painting style that’s deliberately, forcefully elemental. The toddler in “The Cupboard” (1944) is as much a physical object as a cardboard box or stuffed chair. In “Summer Family,” Barnet plays with a creative paradox, reinventing each specific family member as a geometric symbol in electric jazz zig-zags and colors.

Nearly all of the paintings (and prints) are about people, including some — “The Cave,” “Fourth of July” — where the iconized figures aren’t readily identifiable. One of the few exceptions in the show is the 1965 oil “Eden.” This deceptively simple, abstracted landscape stands more than seven feet tall and is dominated by a towering, near-transparent cone of light pressed on two sides by putty-colored, up-ended triangles. A snapshot of ascension, with the undiluted emotional force of a single piano chord, the picture feels like a sharp intake of cold, dry air — like tripping into a meat locker in the middle of a humid afternoon. It is sublime, and hangs for maximum contrast beside the darker “Singular Language,” a large, stirring, 1959 abstraction where fragments of form jostle for position in narrow passages, colliding like barges in a channel.

These paintings ask and answer the same sort of questions posed by Barnet in figure compositions like “Mother and Child” (1961) and “Woman Reading” (1965). As in the abstractions, pictorial energies are balanced by the interlock of white spaces and blocks of color. “Woman Reading” has a chilly airiness similar to that of “Eden.” The rounded, stark-white cat shape at the center of the red blanket makes a blank spot, a hole in the woman’s torso, even while the curled-up animal implies weight and warmth on the bed. You wouldn’t drink this painting in the same way, like ice-water, if it had a shred more detail — if the cat had whiskers, the blanket embroidery, or the woman nail polish. As is, it’s clean, sharp, and breathtaking, almost Japanese-inspired in its spareness.

The essential subject is the stacking and piling of forms — cat on woman, woman on bed, book raised up over both — and Barnet is absorbed with the relationships between their separate masses, animate but at rest. The same is true in “Mother and Child,” which shows the artist’s second wife and frequent model, Elena, and their young daughter Ona, together on a couch. Like the woman and cat, the woman and child can be read as a single, two-headed creature, in the way they fit snugly together, but are separated subtly by their different-colored clothing. Once again, the formal balance of the figures is supremely satisfying, and lends heft and seriousness to a traditional subject handled here with the simplified precision of a silkscreen print or paper cut-out.

“I want emphatically to contain the emotion and the energy so that it resides entirely in the forms — their proportion, their pressure and tension, expansion, contraction, etc.,” Barnet wrote in a 1960 artist’s statement.

The portraits of Elena and others have, on their surface, a kind of blankness. The description in them is all physical, in the deft assessment of stance and posture — the drape of a suit jacket over a shoulder, the reach of an arm over a sofa back. “Portrait of R.N.N.” (1965) shows a man defined by boxy impatience, a quality encoded in the pause of his fist on his crossed leg, not in his facial features, except for the particular knit of his eyebrows. The personality of the man’s body is lucid and specific. “Kiesler and Wife” tells a story in the expansions and contractions of its physical composition, and the story should be called “Wife and Kiesler.” The man appears shrunken and cowed by the powerful woman beside him, whose casual lounging on the couch becomes a vital act of assertion.

In his 1967 “Self Portrait,” one of the show’s masterpieces, Barnet reveals himself with unflinching honesty. There’s an engaging tension between the delicate, painted-eggshell palette and the strength of his vertical form, invincible as a tower. The directness of his gaze implies a kind of nobility, even if he does seem poised to crush the breath from the calico cat under his right hand.

Montclair Art Museum Curator Gail Stavitsky notes in her essay from the show catalog that fairy tale illustrations by Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth were one of Barnet’s earliest influences. Barnet is pure painter, not illustrator, but it’s interesting nonetheless to think of N.C. Wyeth’s masterful figural compositions, the strong physical presence of his pirates and wizards, when contemplating Barnet’s portraits. Occasionally, in the loneliness of his landscapes, Barnet can also be compared to Andrew Wyeth. He isn’t interested in candles, curtains or seashells used as symbols, but in a picture like “The Three Windows” (1992), the empty bed functions as a Wyeth-like embodiment of his dead sister.

Barnet recovered his affinity for the natural landscape in the 1970s, in a series of Maine-inspired paintings that integrated the sky and sea with feminine figures used almost as architectural structures, buttresses to bridge the blue infinities of air and water. Like many a New England-born painter who fled early to New York, he later rediscovered the power of the coastal landscape during summers in Chamberlain, Maine. “Infinite” (1974) is an elegy in blue, black, and lavender; women in shawls descend a steep hill toward a still, deep ocean, gently lit by an indirect nighttime light source. The painting’s subdued, moody beauty veils the reason for the women’s motion: Are they simply drifting, waiting for something, or do they walk out into the water and disappear? Only the figures, symmetrical as vases, keep the geometric landscape from careening into abstraction.