Barnet's Contour Lines

One thing among many that enthralls me in Will Barnet’s figurative paintings from the 60s on is the double-functioning contour lines that are especially well demonstrated in this work, The Blue Robe, 1962, which depicts his wife Elena and their daugher Una. The painting is consistently constituted of flat areas, so that his graphic lines model a form without shading. Each line, simplified to the utmost -- absolutely straight or otherwise curved with minimum undulation -- is therefore carefully deliberated not only to model a form, like the scoop on the right hem of her blue robe which brings out the swell of her breast, the slight dip in the line that defines the upper side of her arm down to the wrist, Una’s foreshortened thigh, and the subtle lift in the bottom line of the cushion on which she rests. But, most spectacularly, a single line often serves to define two forms simultaneously, like the underside of woman’s same arm which, resting on the shoulder of the sofa, also defines its upper ledge, the cat hanging on her knee, and the child’s right arm over her head. Barnet also likes to bring two lines, straight and curved, tangentially or nearly so, as in the woman’s left arm against her robe, the cat’s arched back against the sofa’s edge, and the girl’s buttock against her left arm. By this means the composition gains a tightly fit integration like that of clasped hands in which the two hands meet along a single continuous line, and the picture, seemingly simple, is infinitely intriguing. Will Barnet, now 101 years young (or, will be in May), just completed a selective retrospective at the National Academy Museum in New York, which illustrated the four phases of his pictorial career -- expressionist, para-cubist, figurative, and back to abstraction when he reached 80, curated with the same economy of means as the master’s art. Bless him.