Enfant 1951

Will Barnet made this print, "Enfant," sometime in the twentieth century, and it's now hanging out at MoMA. What strikes me is the way Barnet mixes colors - that bold orange, a kind of electric backdrop for the cobalt blue and a slash of lime green. It’s like he's setting up a visual playground, right? The drawing itself has this lovely, searching quality, like the artist is feeling his way through the image. The blue lines are not precise, but scratchy and gestural. There’s a little circular form at the top, and it looks like it was drawn with a crayon. It suggests a head, a face, or maybe just the idea of a person. Look at the base of the figure, where the lime green meets that blue line. It creates a tension, a little vibration that keeps your eye moving. Barnet’s willingness to leave things open, to not quite resolve every form, connects him to artists like Joan Miró, who also played with abstraction and figuration, suggesting rather than defining. It's this kind of openness that makes art an ongoing conversation.