Introducing the Collector: Richard Roundtree

 

Ernie Barnes’ Slam Before the Storm comes from Richard Roundtree, the iconic actor best known for his role as John Shaft in the Shaft movie franchise. His breakout performance in the first Shaft film—a 1971 classic that defined the "Blaxploitation" genre—earned him a Golden Globe nomination.

 

Roundtree was born in 1942 in New Rochelle, New York, and began his career as a model, having been discovered by Eunice W. Johnson, of the Johnson Publishing Company, which published Ebony and Jet magazines. Over his five decades as an actor, he has appeared in some 160 film and television projects—sharing the screen with actors including Clint Eastwood, Peter O’Toole, Laurence Olivier, Samuel L. Jackson, and Brad Pitt—and received numerous awards, such as an MTV Lifetime Achievement Award, a Peabody Award, and a Black Theater Alliance Lifetime Achievement Award.

 

Roundtree was familiar with Barnes’ football career in the 1960s and learned of his artistic practice when Sammy Davis Jr. and Charlton Heston purchased his works. He discovered that Barnes lived just four blocks away from him in Los Angeles and walked to his home to meet with him. He purchased the two fantastic Barnes paintings that Phillips is offering this season directly from the artist in 1981, and they have been in his possession ever since.

"In the Black community, the athlete was respected as the finest embodiment of one’s African heritage. There were those convinced that the only way to heaven was with a football or a basketball."
—Ernie Barnes

Slam Before the Storm is a glorious example of the neo-Mannerist sports-themed tableaux that serve as the backbone of Ernie Barnes’ body of work. The painting turns a neighborhood basketball game into a transcendent display of athletic prowess performed by figures whose elongated proportions enhance the almost balletic quality of the action.

 

The image’s dynamic style is characteristic of Barnes’ compositions. The artist—who died in 2009 and whose work has seen a surge of curatorial and collector interest in recent years—was a professional football player from 1960 to 1965, before devoting himself to art full-time. He noted that “being an athlete helped me to formulate an analysis of movement, and movement is what I wanted to capture on canvas more than anything else. I can’t stand a static canvas.”¹“Slam before the Storm provides the viewer with more than a snapshot of Black leisure, rather, it forces the viewer to experience Black male bonding. The basketball court was the Black male country club.”
—Clinée Hedspeth, Phillips, Chicago-Midwest, Former Director of Curatorial Services, DuSable Museum of African American Art History

The action in Barnes’ works ranges from lively and exuberant (as in his famous Sugar Shack, 1976, which depicts the scene inside a Black dance hall) to violent and ruthless, with these qualities often combining in his sports paintings—a reflection, perhaps, of his conflicted feelings about athletics. Although playing football had offered Barnes a path to worldly success from his humble beginnings in a Black area of segregated Durham, North Carolina, known as the Bottoms, he resented the game’s brutality and the way it kept him from pursuing his artistic calling.

“[Barnes] grew up to be not only a college and professional gridiron star, but one of the nation’s best sports artists whose canvases capture the strength, terror, tragedy and humor of life in the athletic arena.”
—Louie Robinson

This ambivalence provided the great artistic tension in Barnes’ work. Slam Before the Storm, with its backdrop of brooding skies and its intricate layout of contorting figures, has all the drama of Mannerist and Baroque religious paintings. The game takes place in a dusty, desolate landscape, and the ball, positioned at the brightest point in the sky, reads as either a haloed icon or an earthly object blocking the light. One of the players holds an impossibly effortless stance midair that suggests the ascension of Christ. Indeed, he seems disengaged from the game, his right hand shooting up to the heavens. With such paintings, which redress the lack of Black representation in Western art history by recasting canonical imagery with Black protagonists, Barnes serves as a precursor to Contemporary artists such as Kerry James Marshall and Kehinde Wiley. 

Coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, Barnes did not identify with the abstract styles that prevailed in the art world at the time. In his 1995 autobiography, From Pads to Palette, he wrote that he found such work to be “cold” and described an artistic awakening he had when looking at a portfolio of Charles White’s drawings in a Harlem bookstore in 1960.² He explained that this was the first time he encountered artwork “reflecting Black lifestyle” and that he believed that “this was what art should be about; expressing the confidence, the pride and hopes of people committed to the struggle for human dignity.”³ It was a noble view, and one that places Barnes in an important artistic lineage that continues to flourish today, when painters including Marshall, Henry Taylor, Jordan Casteel, and Amy Sherald have reinvigorated figurative traditions to produce powerful expressions of Black experience.

 

¹ Ernie Barnes, interviewed by Dave Price, “Here’s the Story,” TV Land, n.d., online.

² Ernie Barnes, From Pads to Palette (Waco, TX: WRS Publishing, 1995), 30.

³ Ibid.