You Can Play Your Own Game and Still Win

THE GROOVE

Welcome to the 166th issue of The Groove.

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The art market has grown since I started my advisory company 14 years ago, from $39.5 billion in 2009 to $67.8 billion in 2022. So too has the appetite for rediscovering artists, whether dead or alive, and for exploding their markets exponentially.

Last year, Ernie Barnes, who died in 2009 at the age of 70, made headlines when his most iconic painting, The Sugar Shack (1976) sold at auction for $15.2 million, reaching ten times the price estimate. This immediately prompted galleries and museums to scramble for a piece of the action from the artist’s estate. When I was in Houston this summer, I stumbled upon The Sugar Shack at the Museum of Fine Arts as it has been loaned by its new owner, collector Bill Perkins, until this coming December 31st. And last week I saw something I hadn’t ever seen before in my 20+ years attending this fair: one of Barnes’s canvases on the walls of Art Basel Miami Beach.

What was in Barnes’s career that was both so good and so bad that it didn’t fully take off until now? And what can we learn from him?

If you look at any industry, you will always find gatekeepers, spoken and unspoken rules that may be outdated and absurd, barriers of entry that make no sense, power-players that insist on not letting anyone rock the boat, and other preposterous commandments that people tend to accept without questioning. But history is full of disruptors and outsiders dancing at the beat of their own drum who can -and often do- better than insiders.

Barnes was actually quite successful in his lifetime, but not in the same way as other Black artists of his generation, like Bob Thompson, Jack Whitten or Sam Gilliam. (Although none of them have attained the recent auction record of Barnes.) He had been drafted as a professional football player in the NFL, and for six years that’s what he did. But he had always painted and sketched figures and in 1965, he refocused his energies on becoming an artist.

The artist had quite the entrepreneurial attitude, and when he moved to LA in 1965, he asked the hotelier Barron Hilton to make him the official painter of the American Football League (now the NFL). Hilton loved the idea and encouraged Barnes to make the proposal to team owners. Through those connections, the owner of the New York Jets, Sonny Werblin, invited Barnes to New York and offered him $14,500—$1,000 more than he made in his last season of football—to create 30 paintings over the next six months. The career of Ernie Barnes, the artist, was launched.

After a year of painting, 28-year-old Barnes had enough work for Werblin to sponsor Barnes's first solo show at the famed Grand Central Art Galleries in New York. And while everything sold, the show wasn’t a critical success. So instead of trying again, Barnes decided to reject the art world too. I think this is why his work never got the support that he would’ve liked. Because he disengaged from playing the game after his first show.

Successful outsiders don’t cross their arms waiting for things to happen; they put in the work to see their efforts pay off. Barnes decided to build a financially rewarding practice on his own terms. No need for galleries or critics. To give himself a cushion, he took hundreds of commissions from celebrities, musicians, and athletes.

Then, moved by the Black Is Beautiful movement, Barnes began producing works that would comprise a show titled "The Beauty of the Ghetto." It opened in 1972 at what was then known as the California Museum of Science and Industry and traveled the country for seven years.

He never stopped being a true entrepreneur, making prints of his works for people who couldn’t afford the paintings and networking across industries. That’s how in 1973, he met with the producer Norman Lear, who was working on a new TV show. Lear was fascinated with Barnes and asked to use his paintings on the show. This was Barnes’s watershed moment: when "Good Times" debuted on CBS in 1974, his work took a starring role and The Sugar Shack became a thing of its own, so much so that in 1976 Marvin Gaye asked Barnes to use the painting as his album cover “I Want You”.

Here’s another reason for the current frenzy around Barnes: he was wildly talented and a cultivated student of art history as much as he was an activist and a sensitive observer of his surroundings. His paintings were unlike anything else, combining the palettes of El Greco and Tintoretto with the more modern takes of American artists such as Charles White and Thomas Hart Benton. The way he rendered the figure carries a special energy and beauty. "Being an athlete helped me to formulate an analysis of movement… And movement is what I wanted to capture on canvas.”

But he also added subtle activism clues in his work. One consistent and distinct feature is that his subjects generally have their eyes closed. “I began to see, observe, how blind we are to one another's humanity. We don't see into the depths of our interconnection. The gifts, the strength and potential within other human beings. We stop at color quite often. So one of the things we have to be aware of is who we are in order to have the capacity to like others. But when you cannot visualize the offerings of another..."

The key reason for Barnes’s resurgence is that he was an excellent painter with something to say. His pieces looked and felt different from anything else.

The irony isn’t lost on me, now that his work is in major museums and reputable galleries, that years after the successes of “The Beauty of the Ghetto” and “Good Times” Barnes would say: "When I found out that I didn't have to belong, really, to [the art world], that was much more assuring to me as a human being.”

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TEDX TALK

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I share three lessons I have learned from artists that always work for anyone in their careers. Watch it here.

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