Jun 24, 2010 - Sale 2219

Sale 2219 - Lot 33

Price Realized: $ 19,200
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
ERNIE BARNES (1938 - 2009)
Song of Myself.

Oil on canvas, circa 1970. 609x914 mm; 24x36 inches. Signed in oil, lower right. Titled in ink on the stretcher bars.

Provenance: the artist, California; the collection of George and Joyce Wein, New York.

Illustrated: Syncopated Rhythms: 20th Century African-American Art from the George and Joyce Wein Collection, Boston University Art Gallery, p. 24.

Exhibited: Syncopated Rhythms: 20th Century African-American Art from the George and Joyce Wein Collection, Boston University Art Gallery, November 18, 2005 - January 22, 2006.

In the Syncopated Rythms catalogue, Barnes recalls the guitar player as a figure "that I was exposed to when I was growing up in my hometown of Durham, North Carolina. It reveals, I think...the way the people who sang the blues, sang as a way of solving the blues...I've become aware that music is an investigation of the black mind and reveals the inner world of what is really an oral culture...(The title) is quite correct. The only thing (the guitar player) is exposed to is his own feelings. Singing was an avenue, of course of expressing those feelings."

This painting is a scarce, early example of a blues subject by the recently deceased artist. Barnes, who played in the NFL until his retirement in 1968, is best known for the famous 1971 Sugar Shack dance scene, which appeared on the 1970s television show Good Times and on the 1976 album cover for Marvin Gaye's I Want You.