"My interest has been in developing further the plastic convictions that have been evolving in my abstract paintings; so that a portrait, while remaining a portrait, becomes in this sense an abstraction: the idea of a person in its most intense and essential aspect." --Will Barnet, 1962

Will Barnet (1911-), much like Chuck Close and Alex Katz, has approached painting through sustained exploration of the relationship between abstract, geometric forms and the processes of perception. In this book, which accompanied an exhibition of the same name at the Palmer Museum of Art and the...