Rarely exhibited and unfamiliar to most, these small, postcard size works on paper are primarily from the 1950s, a period of intense change and development in Barnet’s own life and work, and in the avant-garde American art world. It was for many an intense period of rebellion against narrative realism of thirties’ Regionalism and a time of determined self-identification with the act very of painting—Pollock, Kline, de Kooning, Mitchell and seemingly the entire New York art world were swept up in the “heroic” romanticism of Abstract Expressionism.

And, it is so like Barnet, independent and contrarian to the core of his being, to not only eschew self-important gestures of grandeur and painterly “consequence,” but to produce small, intimate watercolors and mixed media paintings, at once gestural and cerebral, where size has nothing to do with scale and personal ambition. As much as the wall-size paintings of his peers, the watercolors, often combined with pencil drawing and opaque gouache, literally brush up against the very origins of abstract expressionism as spiritual release. Crucially, Barnet’s works on paper are also about materials and processes shaping internal paradox--how drawing, transparency and opacity evoke a sense of multi-layered spontaneity and freedom—and are, paradoxically, anything but easy or spontaneous.   These miniature paintings are carefully, rigorously composed, often with small compartments containing even smaller fragments—signs and symbols unearthed from some archaeological dig that, of course, resides only in the artist’s imagination. As small as the pictures are, they contain multitudes. These tightly packed pictures have a quality of compression and release, opening and closing, organic and geometric, interior and exterior.   For Barnet, they were at once unfinished, in the sense of an on-going cycle of continuous “moments,” and finally, complete in their fecund fullness.

— Christopher Crosman, 2022

There is a floating, liquid quality to the paintings, the slippery translucency and color absorption colliding and coalescing imperceptibly.  Colors blend and shapes bend; forms slip beneath one another or become separate; others overlap and mingle collegially.  Lines meander, stop and start, appearing to either segregate or connect.   The language of signs is suggestive of antiquity, although it is impossible to know whether it is reciting elements of mundane quiddity—grocery lists, perhaps—or mystical incantation? Others works on paper sometimes prefigure the larger, finished oil paintings. But, the works on paper were rarely executed as studies. Instead, they stand as independently as individual art works, related to each other but signaling passage among different creative acts.

— Christopher Crosman, 2022

As evidence of a living human hand, they are each extremely private, in the way that Indian miniature paintings or illuminated medieval manuscript pages can only be looked at by one person at a time. It is telling that in a final outpouring of creativity during the last few years of Barnet’s long life, he came back to these small watercolors from a half-century earlier.  They echo and seem to have inspired Barnet’s last and surprisingly original series of abstract oil paintings.  Whether the artist was actually looking at these early works on paper or simply remembering how it felt to make them, there is in the late abstractions an exquisite, improvisational “feel” and mystery.  It is possible to view these early paintings on paper in relation to Barnet’s last works of art as belonging to an order of indelible memories tracing where some of his best works—figurative and abstract—had come from; his private hymnal, prayers, one imagines.

– Christopher Crosman, 2022