12/21/2023 0 Comments Ernie barnes the tunesmith![]() Prior to the auction, the painting was in a private collection, having only had three owners since leaving the artist’s studio.Ĭhristie’s cites a relatively sparse exhibition history, starting at a group show on Black art and cinema at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 2004. Perkins won the work for $15.3 million after a lengthy bidding war. Perkins won the day after a grueling 10 minutes of bidding-“it started and it just went nuts,” he told the New York Times, adding that when a rival bidder, identified by the Value as Dane Jensen of Los Angeles art advisory Gurr Johns, warned that he wouldn’t stop bidding, “I replied, ‘Then I’m going to make you pay.’”īill Perkins and his fiancée, Lara Sebastian, at Christie’s with Ernie Barnes’s The Sugar Shack (1976). “To show that African Americans utilize rhythm as a way of resolving physical tension.”Īhead of opening the lot, auctioneer Adrien Meyer warned that there were “22 telephones” poised to enter the fray, but the winning bidder, Bill Perkins, made a special trip to New York from Houston to ensure he could bid in person. “The painting transmits rhythm, so the experience is re-created in the person viewing it,” Barnes, who died in 2009, said in an interview with the Soul Museum. The 1976 work went for $15.3 million, or an astonishing 76 times its high estimate of $200,000.Ī celebration of Black joy, the painting depicts an enthusiastic crowd of men and women with elongated limbs, seemingly carried away by the music as they dance the night away. The unexpected star lot of last week’s Christie’s 20th century auction was The Sugar Shack, the most famous painting by Ernie Barnes.
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