form and feeling

AFTER A WILD PARTY held in his honor by Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire in 1908, the “naive” painter Henri Rousseau took Picasso aside and drunkenly confided to him, “You and I are the two greatest painters of our time, you in the Egyptian style, I in the Modern.” The remark may or may not have been a putdown, but either way, it hints at some important truths about modernism. By “Egyptian,” Rousseau likely meant Picasso’s technique of eliminating the distinction between front and side views, as well as the inspiration he drew from archaic art, especially African. But Rousseau’s own work has a “primitive” quality, and the simplified flatness of his outsider-art style is arguably even more “Egyptian” than Picasso’s sophisticated Cubism. Perhaps it’s best to say that while Rousseau may have been over-generous in ranking himself alongside Picasso, both were modernists, and as modernists both were indebted to the art of the distant past—in many ways more so than to the art of the recent past.

The same is true of the American modernist painter and printmaker Will Barnet (1911–2012), whose many, diverse styles include some that recall folk art and ancient Egypt. Indeed, Barnet referred to the group portraits he made of his family during the 1980s and ’90s as a “hieroglyphic art,” in which the figures, while representing his actual family members, are also “abstractions—symbolic images of people and