Will Barnet
Woman Reading, 1965
From a preview, of a Will Barnet exhibition, in Town Topics, Princeton's weekly community newspaper ...
WOMAN READING: Or is she? Will Barnet's 1970 color serigraph suggests numerous formal segmentings of the subject. To see the colors (the bedspread deep red, the book solid blue, the cat pure white) go to the Mason Gross Galleries. The show runs from now through February 4.
The serigraph, Woman Reading, really shows a woman reading. And that's a very definite cat curled up with her, and a very definite book in her hands. But you can't simply label it "representational." Look at the woman's eyes: you can see she's not reading, she's looking elsewhere; she may even be aware that she is what's being read. The book might be a mirror she doesn't want to look into. Or perhaps she's using it to hide some flaw in her forehead or maybe the fact that she doesn't have a forehead, since she actually only consists of a segment of a face against a semblance of pillow with a fraction of sheet cutting her off at the chin. Look at the image more closely still and it's almost as if she's been very neatly and precisely mutilated. So much for realism. Woman, bed, bedclothes, book, and cat are all provisional; it's the equivalent of an artist showing you his hand: here are the elements, now see how you can put them together.
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