ERNIE BARNES, FINAL DRAFT FOR FASTBREAK
A study for one of Ernie Barnes most important and identifiable works, the present lot, Final Draft for Fastbreak, is in an inordinately crucial piece of the making of Barnes’ pinnacle painting, Fastbreak. From an early age, Barnes was at his essence an artist; eventually, his masonry teacher also took note of his sketches and encouraged him to begin bodybuilding while also developing his artistic passions. By the end of high school, Ernie Barnes was the captain of his high school team and went on to have a long NFL career while strengthening and experimenting with his artistic career. Once retired, Barnes became the official artist of the New York Jets, having developed a distinct style at which he was able to capture movement through his elongated muscular subjects, often seemingly suspended in mid-air.
“... Barnes has focused his artist’s eye on the emotive truths found in the physical attitudes of the body. By his bravura technique, his artistic finesse, his elongations and distortions, his disregard for the confinements of anatomy, his dismissal of classical spatial relationships, Barnes has transformed the everyday happenings of 20th century society into the fierce, elemental and forceful components of a new symbolism, at once barbarously powerful and exquisitely beautiful.”
His work is at once cinematic, yet feels as though t.mes has been interrupted, preserved in one singular moment. The present lot is a pristine example of his Neo-Mannerist style. At one of the most celebrated moments of his career, Dr. Jerry Buss, the owner of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, commissioned a painting by Barnes in 1987 after they had achieved their 10th NBA title over the Boston Celtics. The starting five players of the Lakers, some of the most decorated NBA athletes of all t.mes , including from left to right, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Michael Cooper, Earvin “Magic” Johnson, and James Worthy, seemingly perform an athletic dance.
While the painting is a true masterpiece of Barnes’ oeuvre, the present lot, Final Draft for Fastbreak, truly examines the most important qualities of his stylistic technique. The painting itself radiates energy from the vibrant colors throughout and depth of the raucous crowd, yet the present lot isolates the methodology from which he is able to achieve this dynamism. The lines of each figures’ limbs and intention of their communication in the game is uniquely present in this work. By synthesizing the work to its most elementary state, one is able to see the artistic technique for which Barnes has become known, emanating from his own personal experiences.
“Being an athlete helped me to formulate an analysis of movement. Movement is what I wanted to capture on the canvas more than anything else. I can't stand a static canvas.”