Sweeter as the Days Go By

THE PRICELESS ART OF ERNIE (I WANT YOU) BARNES

“Motown is more than just a sound, it’s a feeling, an attitude, a look, a sense of style, uniquely its own. Ernie Barnes captured it on canvas – and now we capture it on stage.”

Forty years ago, those words were voiced by Smokey Robinson midway through the Motown 25 television special, addressing an audience of millions. There followed a performance by the Lester Wilson Dancers, soundtracked to Marvin Gaye’s sensual “I Want You.”

That particular stage set was built to evoke what has since become an extremely valuable piece of art: The Sugar Shack, painter Ernie Barnes’ depiction of a club’s intense interior, populated by elongated dancers, determined to lose themselves in the rhythm of the night.

In Motown 25, Lester Wilson’s troupe sought to capture the pulse and the exuberance of the image – a challenge at the best of times, but made all the more so by the previous segment of the TV special: the stunning “moonwalking” of Michael Jackson during his performance of “Billie Jean.”

That aside, the backstory of The Sugar Shack (first known just as Sugar Shack) and its worldwide showcase on the front of Gaye’s 1976 album, I Want You, is a familiar one. What makes it worth a reprise is the opening of a new exhibit of Barnes’ paintings in Los Angeles just a few days ago, as well as the reminder last month that it’s another onetime Motown artist who owns the original which captivated Gaye in the first place.

Moreover, a different Barnes creation with a Motown connection was sold for a tidy sum in November: The Tunesmith, originally given to Berry Gordy by the artist himself.

“Ernie Barnes: Where Music and Soul Live” is the just-opened display, which runs to April 1 at the United Talent Agency (UTA) Artist Space in Beverly Hills. It features paintings which the former pro football star created from the 1970s to the 2000s (he died in 2009), and draws from his estate and loans from collectors – of whom there have been many over the decades. A news report of an early Barnes showcase (in his home state, North Carolina) in 1973 noted that his paintings were owned by, among others, Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, Diana Ross, Harry Belafonte, Flip Wilson, Ethel Kennedy, Dean Martin – and Berry Gordy (predating Gaye’s Sugar Shack acquisition). Today’s music collectors of the artist’s work are said to include Ray Parker Jr., Billy Davis and Marilyn McCoo, and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson.

DOMINOES AND SINNERS

Many of Barnes’ celebrated paintings of black life recall his growing up in segregated Durham, NC; he attended North Carolina College, where he played football and majored in art. He turned to professional sport in 1960, starring in a variety of top teams until, six years later, he retired from football to commit himself fully to his art. Among other credentials, he was appointed the official artist of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

The idea for The Sugar Shack was sparked by a teenage Barnes’ attempt to get into the Durham Armory to hear Clyde McPhatter & the Dominoes. He later said he “saw people moving on the dance floor with raw passion. My little Christian mind was shocked. What went through my mind was, ‘Oh my God, I’m among sinners…If my mother knew I was here.’ But I couldn’t move. Then after a while, the music had me moving.”

***Ernie Barnes, 1992 (photo: Ricardo DeAratanha, Los Angeles Times)***

How that image connected with Marvin Gaye may be most accurately described by his late wife, Jan, in her autobiography, After the Dance. She remembered her mother, Barbara Hunter, visiting the Motown singer’s Los Angeles home in Hidden Hills “with one of her friends, an engaging black man named Ernie Barnes.” Gaye was enchanted by the painter’s personal stories, as well as by his paintings seen in the popular ’70s TV sitcom, Good Times. In this telling, he played the just-completed I Want You album to Barnes, and sought his permission to put The Sugar Shack on the front cover. “Your picture does what no other picture can do,” Gaye said. “It makes the music come alive.” The artwork was tweaked so that the banner for Durham R&B radio station WSRC – to which Barnes used to listen, growing up – instead displayed Gaye’s initials as a call-sign. Plus, the title of the long-player was added in another banner.

I Want You proved to be the first of a half-dozen album covers to feature Barnes’ creations. These included The Disco, on Faith Hope & Charity’s self-titled 1978 album; Late Night DJ, on Curtis Mayfield’s Something To Believe In, 1980; and In Rapture, on B.B. King’s Makin’ Love Is Good For You, 2000. The painter’s last major commission was for Bill Withers, a work inspired by the latter’s hit, “Grandma’s Hands.” The two men became close friends.

“He wanted to help people peel away that layer of protection that we all wear to ward off any intrusion into our real private thoughts,” Withers told the Los Angeles Times in 2009. “He didn’t mind people looking deeper into him.”

A $15 MILLION SECOND EDITION

After Marvin Gaye’s death, the original of The Sugar Shack was acquired from his estate by an actor/comedian who was well-acquainted with various Motown stars and who in 1992 made his own album for the company: Eddie Murphy. “I paid 50 grand for that picture,” he told late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel last month, going on to explain that I Want You actually featured a duplicate painted by Barnes for Gaye, with the above-cited tweaks.

The Tunesmith: *“composed with immense focus”*

The financial value of the artist’s legacy has now been elevated by that second edition, which sold for $15 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York last May. The seller was anonymous, there were 22 bidders, and the winner was an energy trader. The auction house’s initial high estimate of the sale price? $200,000.

Last November, another Barnes creation on canvas, 1978’s The Tunesmith, was sold by Sotheby’s for $630,000. The painter had originally given this to Berry Gordy; the Motown founder later gifted it to another collector, and, in time, it was acquired by November’s seller.

“Gordy's own legacy on American music finds resonance in the passion with which the protagonist in The Tunesmith concentrates on his piano,” declared the auction house in its catalogue. “Posed to compose a song with immense focus, the protagonist of the present work perfectly exemplifies Barnes’s unique Neo-Mannerist approach of depicting figures with elongated limbs, a style that imbues them with infectious energy, movement, and rhythm.”

Such grand prose aside, it’s easy to see why The Tunesmith must have appealed to Gordy, whose own first success in the music business came through songwriting.

And given all of the above, it’s intriguing to wonder what another striking image – that of Gordy himself, portrayed as Napoleon, painted by DeVon Cunningham circa 1968-69 – might be worth today (assuming it still exists). There was an MPG connection then, too: it was Anna Gordy Gaye – the singer’s first wife, the Motown founder’s sister – who commissioned the work. “Damn, I like that,” Berry Gordy told Cunningham at its unveiling.

Perhaps The Sugar Shack has set a precedent…

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