Ernie Barnes' Masterwork, 'Quintet,' Sells for $645,000

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Ernie Barnes’ highly touted painting Quintet, circa 1989, sold for $645,000 at Heritage Auctions in May. 

“Almost like a more modern Thomas Hart Benton or El Greco,” Aviva Lehmann, Heritage’s Director of American Art, said in describing Barnes (1938-2009). “His works are lyrical, as close to dancing as a painting can get. And Quintet is among the most intimate masterworks of his entire oeuvre.” 

Barnes has been described as the “Picasso of the Black art world.” Last year, The Sugar Shack, which Barnes painted in 1976, sold for $15.3 million at Christie’s.

Barnes, who died in 2009, was born in North Carolina in 1938 and often drew upon his own experiences growing up in the American South during the Jim Crow era in his depictions of social moments and images of every day Black life.

At age 18, on a college art class field trip to the newly-desegregated North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, Barnes asked where he could find “paintings by Negro artists.” The docent responded, “Your people don’t express themselves that way.” Twenty-three years later in 1979, Barnes returned to the museum for a solo exhibition.

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