Wright Auction

Central Park Siesta appears as the very first work in the catalog raisonné of Barnet's prints. Created in 1932 and printed in an edition of just six, this work was made when Barnet was just twenty-two-years-old and studying at the Arts Students League in New York. Barnet had previously studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, not far from his coastal hometown of Beverly, Massachusetts. 

Barnet joined the Arts Students League in 1931, arriving in New York with ten dollars and a small portfolio of drawings of craggy seascapes and his cat. He rented a one-dollar-a-night room while attending the League and, after many years spent in the small, secluded town of Beverly, he feverishly sketched the ferment and static of the city as it was in the grips of the Great Depression.

Central Park Siesta captures Barnet's young, curious, outward-facing gaze—far different from the introspective, symbolist paintings of his mature work—as well as the influence of his mentor at the League, Charles Locke, and their mutual idol, the 19th century French artist Honoré Daumier. Both were most celebrated as printmakers and used social realism to depict scenes of pathos toward the working class and lambaste the political and bourgeois elite.

Barnet employs the historical style of his predecessors in Central Park Siesta, while also bringing an expressionistic lilt to an otherwise common scene of a man taking a nap on a park bench. Though he is often associated with moody, familial psychoscapes, Barnet often revisits the theme of "rest" throughout his work, as seen in portraits of his father from the 1930s and Summer Idyllic from 1976. Already apparent in this very early lithograph is Barnet's ability to instill intimate scenes with an underlying, engaging and mysterious dynamism—a characteristic that would come to dominate his later work and major paintings.

David & Vivian Campbell

20th Century Collectors and Philanthropists

David and Vivian Campbell were prominent philanthropists of the arts in Canada and collectors of early modern masters. Over the course of half a century, David and Vivian built a collection around intimate and dazzling works by giants of early 20th century art—Picasso, Matisse, Gris, Gauguin, Munch and Rodin among them—as well as later 20th century artists such as Will Barnet, Saul Steinberg and David Hockney, who grew out of the traditions of earlier masters, with a reverence for landscape and portraiture.

The scope of the century, along with the Campbells' distinct tastes within its vastness, are presented in the selection offered here; a landscape study of Le Pont Neuf by Paul Signac from 1895, the earliest work in the sale, shares the same musicality of color as Andy Warhol's screenprint of Beethoven from nearly one hundred years later. Portraits by Matisse and Hockney, done forty years apart, both present subjects that are quirky and grounded, executed with an economy and confidence of line. Irving Penn photographs Igor Stravinsky with the same adulatory nod seen in a portrait by André Kertész of his predecessor, Brassaï. An exuberant collage by Picasso celebrates the birth of his son, while Old Man's Afternoon by Will Barnet meditates on loss and aging. A thread evident throughout the selection is the ability for the art that we love to reflect the life that we live.