Everybody is using the words “abstraction” and “abstract,” and I’m not sure we all agree on what they mean.

Every great artist is abstract. The fact that he uses an image… the best example is Ingres or Chardin. The way people looked at Ingres, the academicians, the people I studied with; they thought of him as someone who worked with surfaces, made beautiful surfaces, textures. And he did. He caught the high bourgeois development in the French social setup. But beneath it he was probably one of the most abstract artists of the period, much more abstract than Delacroix or any of those. He was considered old-fashioned at that time, but later on he had a greater influence on Picasso and all the modern painters, more than anyone else. What happened with Ingres was that he understood that the figure had to be carried way beyond its immediate reality. For instance, he did that famous figure of the man at the Metropolitan Museum, the man with his hands on his knees, and you can see through all the drawings how he struggled to express that man.

…it’s the forces of nature retranslated into the forces of painting. It’s painting the natural aspect of reality and finding a way of saying it in the language that’s proper for painting — the use of the vertical and the horizontal — which is what I call the anguish of painting.

First he had him leaning on a pedestal and other things, and he felt very dissatisfied. But when he was able to get that tremendous sense of that body sitting in that chair, sagging down with the hands pressing on the knees, you begin to get the intensity of that personality, the physical power, the mental power, the concentration on that man. So Ingres was able to go beyond the hundreds of sketches to the point where he made this figure represent the total aspect of the man’s life as well as Ingres’ life as a painter. You begin to say the painting is like a Mondrian in the sense that it’s broken up into a series of horizontal expansions that only Ingres understood.

It’s like the Odalisque that he did when he was young, how he stretched out that woman. She has about 1,500 vertebrae in the back. He pulled it and pulled it until it became a tremendous mass that stretched out, and he was able to create other masses that countered it, moved in and compressed it so that it wouldn’t just simply slip out of the picture. He contained it. So those forces that I speak of, the horizontal and vertical anguish, have to do with the way I think of painting being abstract. In other words, it’s the forces of nature retranslated into the forces of painting. It’s painting the natural aspect of reality and finding a way of saying it in the language that’s proper for painting — the use of the vertical and the horizontal — which is what I call the anguish of painting. It’s a struggle all the time. No matter what painting I touch. It’s how how do I make this thing work?

I was looking at your latest paintings at Kennedy Gallery. The colors that are balanced in Child’s World, by being contained in forms, are now balanced (without any forms) as minute and intricate oppositions in space. In a way, this is another kind of tension or dialogue related to the horizontal and vertical tension: another retranslation.

That’s right, retranslation. The word “abstract,” you can’t isolate it. For instance in my case, the masters that I enjoy, there’s always that tremendous content that I believe in. There’s that content always being subjected to the concept of language itself. The language and the content have to go together all the time, as it’s impossible to really understand painting unless it has those two elements at work. Because if it’s just pure abstraction… I suppose it has its possibilities, and I think some painting in that direction is very beautiful and very good. I can only say this is more personal.