The Stroll

Part of the extraordinary collection of Danny and Donna Arnold—works from which have been offered at Christie’s over the past eighteen months—The Stroll testifies to the couple’s significant friendship with Ernie Barnes. Acquired from the artist by the Hollywood producer and his wife shortly after its creation, it captures the enduring fascination with sport and movement that would come to define Barnes’ oeuvre. Having started his career as a professional footballer, the artist painted spectacles ranging from basketball games and boxing matches to local dances and hushed pool games, each a vehicle for acute social observation. Painted in 1982, two years before he was selected as the official Sports Artist of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, The Stroll takes its place within Barnes’ depictions of horse racing. Stable hands, jockeys and bystanders roam the yard, congregating in pockets of conversation, industry and idleness. Their elongated limbs, rendered in Barnes’ signature Neo-Mannerist style, are alive with movement and character. Exquisitely lit like a film set, the scene is bathed in tantalising cinematic tension: a thousand undisclosed narratives weave across its surface, their secrets suspended in every meticulous detail.

Born in 1938, Barnes grew up in Durham, North Carolina, with a strong interest in art. Though Jim Crow segregation laws inhibited his access to local museums, he devoured books on the Western canon and immersed himself in drawing. Barnes was avowedly unathletic as a child, until an inspirational coach sparked his interest and confidence, leading him to become captain of his high school football team. After majoring in art at North Carolina College, he was drafted by the then-world champion Baltimore Colts, and would go on to play for multiple teams during his successful sporting career. He would frequently make sketches while on the football field, recalling the advice of his college art teacher Ed Wilson to ‘pay attention to what my body felt like in movement. Within that elongation, there’s a feeling. And attitude and expression’ (E. Barnes, quoted in TV interview on ‘Our World with Black Enterprise’, 2008). In 1965, after suffering an injury, Barnes retired from sport and returned to his first love full-time. With the support of New York Jets owner Sonny Werblin, he mounted his sell-out debut exhibition the following year.

The Stroll demonstrates the distinctive visual language that Barnes would go on to cultivate throughout the 1970s. During this period, his depiction of sports would ultimately lead him into broader observations of the human condition, motivated primarily by a desire to pay tribute to the African-American communities in which he had grown up. In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, his love letters to overlooked aspects of everyday Black culture earnt him widespread recognition, with his 1976 painting The Sugar Shack famously gracing the cover of Marvin Gaye’s album I Want You. At the same time, however, his paintings were far from straightforward celebrations. In the present work, echoes of Western art history—from Pieter Bruegel to Edgar Degas—are juxtaposed with subtle socio-political commentary. Many of his subjects have their eyes closed; others have their backs to the viewer, or are shrouded in ambiguity. In the micro-interactions between his subjects, Barnes teases out pertinent narratives of exclusion and invisibility, giving form to his belief that ‘we are blind to one another’s humanity’ (E. Barnes, interview with CNN, 1990).