Will Barnet

Will Barnet was born in 1911 at Beverly, Massachusetts. He went to New York in 1930 after intensive classical training at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He enrolled in the Art Students League that year. In 1936, he was appointed as an instructor there and specialized in the graphic arts. He was politically active during the Depression and was a beneficiary of Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration Graphic Arts Project. Soon he accepted a position as instructor of painting at the Art Students League which lasted until 1980. Many still remember and respect Barnet as a teacher of great personality and aesthetic responsibility. "Our job as teachers, as I see it, is to help students find the larger forms and themes-the permanent values," Barnet once commented. Barnet's trademark, though, concerns "women, the sea and solitude."