Peter Grimes
/Will Barnet
1973
American, 1911-2012
Lithograph, edition of 300
Loan from the Estate of Will Barnet, made possible by Harmon-Meek Gallery
FL.2017.8.32
Three sillhouetted figures stare off at the sea. Two women stand side by side, while another figure is set alone at the left. Based on a narrative poem by George Crabbe and a subsequent opera by Benjamin Britten, Barnet’s Peter Grimes cannot presume its viewer’s knowledge of any version of that story. Indeed, very few will see its title and have a familiar narrative to pair with it — and Barnet would have known this. While we invite you to seek out the full narrative and to imagine which moment in the original poem this might illustrate, for now, envision your own complete story, as the artist would have anticipated. Perhaps your narrative for this picture will bear some similarities (or none at all) with the one that inspired it. That’s the beauty of an open-ended work of art like this.