Enfant

Will Barnet

Will Barnet worked with his student, Master Printer Robert Blackburn, to create this early example of his use of abstraction and color to create 'Enfant.'

Brooklyn Museum Curator Una Johnson made the following observation: "In the composition entitled 'Enfant', a lithograph in three colors - orange, blue and mustard yellow - Barnet adeptly sets down a quick, linear exercise much as a medieval scribe might have embellished an initial letter. Or, in contemporary terms, it serves as an artist's opening statement which will initiate a disciplined evolvment of ideas and abstract forms firmly anchored within a prescribed two-dimensional space.

Robert Doty, Curator of the Whitney Museum discussed Barnet's printmaking in Sylvan Cole's raisonné of Barnet's prints:

"The use of colors in the lithographs of the fifties was an innovation. Previously, his graphic work was limited to black and white. Now his images took on a new boldness with the strength of color eventually overpowering the drawing and formal content. (They) retain a figurative reference, but the immediate impression is one of fragments of bright color."