American Art Collaborative

Between 1927 and 1930 Barnet studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and in the mid 1930s he taught in New York at the Art Students League and the New School for Social Research. Throughout his career Barnet has been a figurative artist, although in the late 1940s he experimented with eliminating realistic space and began using semiabstract forms to convey what he felt were substances and forces in nature. In the mid 1950s, he reduced his images to simple pictographs, although basic human shapes could still be discerned. Around 1960, however, he became dissatisfied with his attempts to unite human and abstract forms, and sought a fresh approach. Starting in 1962, when he exhibited a new series of paintings that reasserted the human figure as his primary subject matter, Barnet has continued to explore themes of meditation and human relationships.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987