In 2016, David Barnett reached an unusual bench mark. Fifty years earlier, he established the art gallery that bears his name in a humble basement on Wisconsin Avenue. In 1985, he moved to his present location, a much grander venue: the 19th-century Button Mansion in East Town. Through the decades, Barnett has followed a parallel set of missions: selling work by world-renowned artists while exposing the work of often unknown Milwaukeeans.
The lines intersect in the Barnett Gallery’s upcoming exhibition, “Wisconsin Artists of the WPA,” a collection of prints (and a few paintings) from the 1930s by area artists with high profiles within their genre, including Robert von Neumann and Schomer Lichtner, alongside others who have been forgotten.
Barnett is a talkative, almost gregarious elder statesman of the Milwaukee art market. It takes creativity and perhaps a touch of artistic license to imagine the introverted teenager of 1966, remembered by some patrons as an almost furtive presence in the already inconspicuous setting of a gallery tucked into the basement of an apartment building.
“I had $186 in working capital,” Barnett recalls. “When I started, I wanted to show the work of my fellow students at UW-Milwaukee—and also Cardinal Stritch, Mount Mary and other colleges. My first sale was a $2 piece of pottery by a UWM student.” In the late ’60s, Barnett borrowed $4,000 from his father and went art shopping in New York. He recalls the Pablo Picasso print he bought for $250 and sold in Milwaukee for $350. Giants still walked the Earth in those years, and bargains could be found.
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Nowadays, the Barnett Gallery occupies a three-story mansion (the top floor is unfinished), with eight fireplaces and 26 rooms spread across 10,000 square feet. The walls are crowded with framed paintings and prints, along with sculpted pieces. Barnett’s collection includes many objects of African origin—an inspiration for Barnett and the modern artists that rose up a century ago in Europe—as well as many local pieces. Among the latter is a large 1948 self-portrait by the talented Milwaukee painter Francesco Spicuzza, posing pipe in hand before a portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven.
A Meeting of Modern Art and Old-World Draughtsmanship
“Wisconsin Artists of the WPA” displays what happened when the abstraction of modern art met Old-World draughtsmanship in the American heartland. The WPA (Works Progress Administration) was a federal program that employed artists during the Great Depression and favored work in the style of the artists included in Barnett’s exhibit. The bold face dominating Schomer Lichtner’s Farmer is drawn in white lines of Henri Matisse simplicity against a black backdrop. Gerrit Sinclair’s etching, Jones Island, depicts an artist at work with his easel, painting the lean-to fisher shanties that once occupied part of Milwaukee’s Harbor District. In Lowell M. Lee’s The Long White Road, a thin, white ribbon of highway snakes past bleak bare trees and disappears into a dark horizon.
Some of the Wisconsin artists who emerged during the WPA era and its aftermath taught art to Barnett from his Shorewood Public School days through UWM. Remarkably humble and low-key about his own visual work, Barnett is primarily a watercolorist producing paintings in series on particular places and people.
However, he has lately been executing visual art with a message in the “Target Series.” These works comment on gun violence and are composed against the backdrop of the target-shooting certificate Barnett received at summer camp when he was 14. Painting those surfaces by hand or with rubber stamps, Barnett also pasts on Native American motifs in birchbark, triggering associations with the U.S. wars against American Indians. The “Target Series” is at once childlike in its imagery and sophisticated in its use of materials.
“I’d buy what I really loved,” Barnett says of his art-shopping trips and the collection he amassed. “I’d try to go into areas that were being neglected—Picasso ceramics in the ’60s; Thomas Hart Benton and the WPA artists when they were unfashionable.” The Barnett Gallery is an art-crowded place where discoveries await around every corner.
Wisconsin Artists of the WPA opens on Gallery Night, Friday, April 26, and runs through Saturday, July 13, at David Barnett Gallery, 1024 E. State St. For more information, call 414-271-5058 or visit davidbarnettgallery.com.
