Question:
This artist’s professional career spanned nearly nine decades, beginning in the 1930s at the Art Students League in New York, where he taught from 1936 through 1980. He is best known for his distinctively flat, stylized aesthetic, and his paintings often feature solitary figures in meditative or enigmatic settings.
In 1971, the artist fell in love with coastal Maine and thereafter returned with his family each summer to work. In 2011, he received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama in Washington, D.C. His work is part of the At Home in New England exhibition currently on view at the Farnsworth.
ANSWER: Will Barnet
In the work titled Bannister by Will Barnet, part of the Farnsworth exhibition At Home in New England, the placement of the upper hallway bannister in this portrait of a young woman indicates that she sits below or is walking upstairs. The bannister’s presence forms an alliance with the cat, equally silhouetted, both fixtures of the home. Bannisters appear in several of Barnet’s figurative compositions, as both design elements and symbolic devices found along passageways in and out of domestic settings. Barnet’s family members and pets incorporated into figure-ground relationships resulted in spatial ambiguity and graphically compelling works.
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