Printmaker Will Barnet was born in Massachusetts in 1911. His prolific artistic career spanned 80 years and an extensive variety of styles. Barnet's education began at the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, from 1928 to 1930. He went on to join the Art Students League in New York, where he focused on printmaking. He taught briefly at Cornell, Yale, Cooper Union, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Museum School, Boston. In 1934, he became the printer for the League, and from 1945 to 1980 he was Instructor of Painting at the League.

He is best known for his abstract images that retain a classical realist tone, and was a key figure in the New York art movement known as Indian Space Painting

Since his first one-man exhibition at New York's Eighth Street Playhouse in 1935, and the Hudson Walker Gallery in 1938, Will Barnet achieved recognition as an independent, highly dedicated painter-printmaker who pursued his own vision, rooted in personal experience and classical aesthetic concepts, ignoring the vagaries of the art world. This emphasis upon Barnet's personal direction is often referred to as the abstract body of work that postdated the artist's figurative Social Realist prints and paintings of the 1930s, inspired by Barnet's appreciation of Giotto, Vermeer, Daumier, and Orozco. During the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the late 40's and 50's, Barnet developed what he called a "clear-edge" abstract geometric style that formed the foundation for his later figure and portrait painting.

A prolific graphic artist, Barnet changed his style significantly at different points in his career. His earliest works were influenced by expressionism; they were followed by abstract works in the 1950s and 1960s, and finally evolved into more figurative works of silhouetted forms set against geometrically designed backgrounds.

His work has been exhibited in prominent museums and galleries in the United States and Canada and is included in many prestigious collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

His work has been exhibited in prominent museums and galleries in the United States and Canada and is included in many prestigious collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

 He especially found inspiration in the Gallatin Collection where Cubist works by Picasso and Gris reinforced Barnet's "love of purity and geometry in painting, the beauty of a flat surface, a cohesive quality of structure and clear forms." Also important to Barnet was his learned appreciation of Byzantine, African, Asian, Oceanic, and Native American art.

Will Barnet - " Dialogue in Green "

Will Barnet - " Interlude " - 1982

Will Barnet - " Interlude II " - 1982

Will Barnet - " Soliloquy "