This tape-recorded interview took place at Will Barnet’s home
in the National Arts Club in New York City, on October 27, 1983.

Will Barnet (looking at his painting Child’s World): It’s a strange thing, I look at these paintings today and I’m amazed at how I composed them. This sense of relationship which always fascinated me: the idea of the world having a dynamic order. And here’s something (pointing to the painting) that’s almost like a multiple of colors, and yet they work.

Toward the end of the forties everything started to abstract in your paintings.

Child’s World, 1947
(Oil on canvas, 28″ x 32″)
© Will Barnet
COURTESY ALEXANDRE GALLERY, NEW YORK

Right. But it was still part of the same thing: the family, the kids. Then all of a sudden the fifties hit. Then when the separation came… I was getting more and more abstract… then my world became very personal, sort of inward for a while. I did very inward paintings. That began that whole period of abstraction from 1950 to 1964, about fourteen years of abstraction. Completely abstract. But they really weren’t. They were just figures taken… well take a look at this one (leading me from the library through the living room to the stairwell where Singular Image, woodcut, 1964, is hung). It’s a singular image. It’s myself. It came about through a relationship to my own personal being. When I had it in Rome, a priest came in and wanted it for a church because he thought it was a crucifix.

I remember reading your description of how it came about. You saw a crack in the sidewalk and in that image something that brought to mind “a raw concept of a person who was pressured from all sides by severe subconscious forces.”

That’s right.

And this central image, the thin, jagged vertical and horizontal intersecting, is literally pressured from all sides by the surrounding color rectangles. It’s very interesting to me, because this woodcut was created in 1964, and the painting, Singular Image, in 1959, while during this same period you also did figurative work.

Right. Now take a look at these figurative paintings. At the same time this figurative work came in. They were going along simultaneously. It’s quite extraordinary.

I know. I’m curious about it because in some way the abstract mode must have felt fulfilled and finished.

Yes. Well, I felt I was coming to the end of my abstract period, but I still had something to say that had to do with my western experiences.

Singular Image, 1959
(Oil on canvas, 68 1/2″ x 46″)
© Will Barnet
COURTESY ALEXANDRE GALLERY, NEW YORK

Is there a way to talk about the feeling of that abstract period coming to an end? Why you turned wholly toward the figurative mode?

I knew that I could no longer, after the sixties, do abstract art. I knew that. I knew I had completely finished it. It was impossible, just impossible. I couldn’t feel it any more. And during the period when I was doing abstract work, I was always trying to figure out how I could once again introduce the human form.

Why?

Because I felt that I needed to set down, for myself anyway, a tangible image that would be universal for people to… first for me to express it, and then for others to get some kind of experience from it that would tie up with their own lives. I needed the warmth of human beings too. I couldn’t just do these abstract things any more. Actually my abstract work is warm. It is not cool at all. So I never really changed that much except that I had to have, I had to finally have an image. The figure was something that… the fact that I had a new life, the need to express that new life was so great that it had to be a figure again. There was no other way of doing it, for me anyway.

Well, it’s interesting because your abstractions were always generated by an image. Whereas Mondrian had the pier and he abstracted from the pier, and then the next step was total abstraction. I don’t think you ever went that next step.

I didn’t want to step. It’s like… how can I put it to you… it was like… it was like cooling it. It was like something very cold, like putting it on ice, the next step. It was like death almost to make it, to make that shape alone.