The word “content” too may be a problem. In a later painting like Early Morning (1972), maybe a quarter of the canvas is objects: a standing woman silhouetted in the right angles of a porch. The rest is the space she looks out on, space with a single horizon line: space cut into by the diagonals, verticals and horizontals of the porch. But most of the content is in the space, the space in relation to the shapes. There seems to be more space in the later paintings.

Early Morning, 1972
(Oil on canvas, 57 3/4″ x 57 1/2″)
© Will Barnet
COURTESY ALEXANDRE GALLERY, NEW YORK

Yes, definitely, the space is much more enormous, yes.

And it seems a natural extension of your early discovery in Early Morning (1943), the first breakthrough that you spoke of where negative space became positive. It became an element of the tension.

From the time I became aware of these problems, which was early in the thirties, I had premonitions of how to do this. That’s when my thinking became more abstract. In other words, here is a piece of air that I want to make into a piece of form. That’s the whole idea. So that those women, the woman standing there, the lone woman in the space between sky and water, are not just… It’s not just sky and water, but they’re actual structures that have been related in such a way that you feel they have form, they’re full. In the Rembrandt portraits, the backgrounds are so powerful that these big heavy forms of these bourgeois Dutch people (usually they were fat)… that the weight of the background was balanced with the weight of the figure. That’s what I mean by abstraction: to be able to see the two, the world outside the figure, and the world within the figure. To put the two together.

You used the word “translate” and the word “nature.” So that abstraction means taking what is significant to you and translating it into the language of painting.

Yes. It’s gone through metamorphosis, a whole metamorphosis.

The Abstract Expressionists were getting into the spotlight while you were going along in this vein. Were you impressed by them?

No. I had no response.

It didn’t get suffused by your art… what they did in no way diluted what your intentions were?

I never was influenced by a contemporary artist. Never. I was always influenced by the past. Always. It’s like growing up… if you’re Catholic, you grow up with a great belief in something. I grew up with a great belief in these masters and they were my soul.

What should art education be?

If the student really wants to learn something about power, you go back and study the Mesopotamians. There you understand what power’s all about because they had power. To me, the great artists are the ones you can be nourished from.

Would you also teach drawing?

Academic drawing? Oh no, that’s the wrong thing to do. That’s the reason I became a teacher. I said, “No academic drawing!” When I was a young student at the Boston Museum School, I used to tell my fellow students, “Don’t study Michelangelo. He’s the end of a period. He’s decadent. He’s a great artist, one of the greatest that ever lived, but you won’t learn anything from him except he’ll give you hell and destroy you. Go to Giotto. And don’t even go to Giotto. Go back before Giotto. Just keep going back, back and that way you get the very essence of the beginnings. And that way you grow.” So that was my method of teaching. In my classes, we went all the way back and then we went forward. So we kept moving between today and yesterday. That’s what I consider an important part of art education.